‘My Eyes Were So Puffy I Was Unable to Even Unseal Them’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical reasons related to a house full of loud preteen children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an eight percent rise 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 conducted for individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

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

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments underneath, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and avoiding the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at least not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “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 didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|