‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for 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 receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, 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 experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|