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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches 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 novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously 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 fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, 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 dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep 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 Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|