‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. 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 dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied 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 underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations 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 blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|