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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed 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 home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of 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 downward with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

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

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on 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 allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” 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 getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|