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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show 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 growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift 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 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|