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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based 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 somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether 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 fully dissipate,” 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 capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts 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 required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|