‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw 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 online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range 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 facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|