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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut 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,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw 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: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic 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 observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward 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, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “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 longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|