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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a house full of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the 30-year-old real estate agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of six cosmetic procedures, 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 open my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of individuals electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Though most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I see individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and drags the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of dermal fillers expands the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are driving a new kind of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional rhytidectomy entails lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis comes with it as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a authentic-appearing and more durable result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

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 effort at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the reality that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery could be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, one day after she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|