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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious 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 – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts 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 techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo 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 where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|