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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – 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 half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for 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 bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “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 result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients 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 thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable 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 currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long 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 drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – 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 cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|