‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes associated with a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted 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 unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure 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 primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|