‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first 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 house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London 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 see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|