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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered 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,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, 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 tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing 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 “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|