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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise 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 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|