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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade 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 doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|