Nipand tuck Why are young women having facelifts?

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, 'filler fatigue', weight-loss drugs and new surgical techniques are attracting a different kind of customer to plastic surgery

- Kate McCusker

AMANDA PREISINGER IS ANXIOUS about her daughter's impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it's the first time that she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. "Obviously I'm going to tell everyone as they come in, 'Just so you know, this is not how I look," says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling - her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new-and she's keen to stress, temporary-look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, in September. "My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn't even open my eyes. That's how swollen I was," she tells me via video call from her house. "I had to tell him: 'Babe, I'm fine, I'm not hurting.

I just look like someone jumped me."" According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s - well over a decade before most doctors' typical patient age range of 40 to 60.

(Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: "We treat genetics, not age.") "I have 28-year-olds asking for 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 procedure, and I'm a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice." A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. "Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion," says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico.