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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London 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 opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

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 bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|