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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of half a dozen cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the skin down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow

Previously reserved of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the superficial layer, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains 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 passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation currently.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with court orders after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|