‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of six 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 saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances 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. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when 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 facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing 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 solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|