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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains 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. Think of 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 skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas 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 needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo 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 think if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|