‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I appear,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are structured a bit like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS 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 performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to look like the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “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 results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We’re going to lift 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 surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|