‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting outcome. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The day before her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|