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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first 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 home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed 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 proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|