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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, 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 first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” 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 believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|