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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|