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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” 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 effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|