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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first 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 needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer 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 skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

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 reached 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 ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|