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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last 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 indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, 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 facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise 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 performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, 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 cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘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 reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|