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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “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 entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do 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 didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – 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 booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|