‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, 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 cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags 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 pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. 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 “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If 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 migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|