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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight 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 former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

You risk 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 overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek 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 operation, including a three-day|