‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat 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 – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed 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: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it 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 additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – 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 brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|