‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Open My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, 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 – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if 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 facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey revealed that the portion of younger facelift patients 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 best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|