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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will reveal her new face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to inform all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a little startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a rhytidectomy, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, low-cost surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for individuals aged 35-55.

“Patients are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning 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 going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is adjusted. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors being landed with legal actions after expressing worries.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it started to migrate 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 required to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, sent to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon stated, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|