‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including 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 initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels 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 surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|