‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last 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 puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little 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 SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an 8% increase 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 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas 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 finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|