‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts 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 conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant 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 correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift 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. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|