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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally 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.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas 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 required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|