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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to 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 jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion 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 appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|