‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift 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’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|