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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts 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 exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|