‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a home packed of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly 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 somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed 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.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|