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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might 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 the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|