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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

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

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort 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 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 believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|