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

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed 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: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of 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 skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

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 widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|