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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

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 “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|