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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together 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 Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, 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, low-cost medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by older methods. “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 advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – 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 purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether injectable substances 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 migrate and can block lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|