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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor 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 open my eyes. That indicates swollen 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 attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show 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 conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now 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 method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue 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 proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|