‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|