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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” 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 SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” 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 effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|