‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Open My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement 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 facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|