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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of loud adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six cosmetic procedures, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse teared up when he saw me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. 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 down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and leads to looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving 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 study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures underneath, allowing surgeons to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing 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 twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Studies have indicated that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the companies who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

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 surgery, one day after she’d arrived alone in Turkey, she decided to add a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, including a three-day|