‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, 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,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is 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 pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months 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.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “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 repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether 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 fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|