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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term 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 do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons 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 other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|