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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see 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 start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler 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 currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research 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 term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|