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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of clamorous preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself choosing between 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 blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|