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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional 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 house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons 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 facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think 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 half-day operation, plus a three-day|