‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance 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 spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|