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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first 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: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution 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, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|