‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk 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 overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort 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 young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically 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. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|