‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of patient towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers 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 more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started 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 just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|