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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin 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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting 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 entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when 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 finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|