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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|