‘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 typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor 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 selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|