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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age 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 asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major 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 facelift, lifts the tissues 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. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails 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 preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined 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.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|