‘I Couldn’t Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “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 rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of 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 undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as blepharoplasty – 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 cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, including a three-day|