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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey 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.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin 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 deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels 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 youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep 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 proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|