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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, 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 among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist 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 soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands 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, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means 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 “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|