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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat 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 ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress 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 deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term 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 do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|