‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit 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 SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing 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 describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|