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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, 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, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, 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 is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey 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.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|