‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|