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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains 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.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied 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 filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|