‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern 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 result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|