‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “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 one of a rising count of people electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments 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 facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|