‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis 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 dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients 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 long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|