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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” says Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of supportive 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 pulls the skin downward with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the underlying structures underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The skin follows along as a passenger.” 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 surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts 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 finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

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 experiencing in her face. She arranged 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 opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|