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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous 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’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 look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned 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 entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic 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, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 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. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called 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 booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|