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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” 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 industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed 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: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit 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 patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|