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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says 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 secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted 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 advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|