‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, 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 teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells 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 Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|