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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states 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 see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|