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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal 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 the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial 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 needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|