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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – 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 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor 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 neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|