‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons related to a home packed of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when overuse of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – combined with the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|