‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, 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

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep 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 face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|