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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen 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 half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t 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 okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based 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 bit concerned when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, 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 scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|