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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse 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 tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic 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 see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant 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 did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|