‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning 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 nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “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.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|