‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property 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 outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders 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 just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|