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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just 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 receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 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 entered 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 harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, 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 risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate 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 could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|