‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Was Unable to Even Open Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen children, but since it’s the first time she will debut her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “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 real estate agent from south Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous month. “My spouse became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facelifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels expands the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

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

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce 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 injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – 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 face and neck lift could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|