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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports 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 performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic 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 call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|