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

Amanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed 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 indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in 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 single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|