‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate 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 might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent 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 recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|