‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to 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 attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Statistics show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they present. “Many 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 cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|