‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues 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 facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags 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 overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|