‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances 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 surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum 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 entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make 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, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|