‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Amanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought 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 deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|