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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw 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 okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London 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 see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, 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 tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned 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 “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – 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 needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|