‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based 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 see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers 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 been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas 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 finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|