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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, 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 had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, 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 conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|