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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, 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 rising count of individuals electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “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 rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|