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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual causes related to a home packed of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like 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 evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block results in a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose 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,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting 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 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look young,” 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 think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, says he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many doctors don’t want to discussing this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|