‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat 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 outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|