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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|