‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “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 more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states 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 gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow 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. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|