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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first 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: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, 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, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue 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 result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests 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 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 twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable 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 right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “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 ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, 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 looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|