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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial 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 okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. 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 drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|