‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift 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’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 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 longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of 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 do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate 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 required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|