‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests 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 age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, 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 using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – 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 cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|