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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, 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 becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “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 using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, 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 companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, 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 replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|