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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how 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 in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered 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 done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons 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 replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution 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 surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|