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

Amanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little 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 superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags 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 follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe 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 shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended 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 jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|