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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, 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 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 online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” 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 secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. 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 late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers 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 young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as 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 might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|