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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based 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 observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|