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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, 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, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, 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 past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|