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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, 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 obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|