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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “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 called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|