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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “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 Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously 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 style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London 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 entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, 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 purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed 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 proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called 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 forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|