‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states 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 see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called 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 endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” 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 says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|