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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – 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 viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding 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 deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|