‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of loud 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 everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s 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 follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove 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 six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|