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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – 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 facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|