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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal 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 okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|