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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells 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 cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|