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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal 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 hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based 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 see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just 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 receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift 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 day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt 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|