‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial 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 had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend 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 – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based 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 observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 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 injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|