‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|