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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

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 layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight 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. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option 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, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|