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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw 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 fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field 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,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|