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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age 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 facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

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

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did 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 dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit 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.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|