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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says 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 observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|