‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her new 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 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

You endanger 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 overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|