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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “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 where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts 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 needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|