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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse 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: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, 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 dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable 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 right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|