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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured 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 superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|