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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the usual causes related to a house full of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, such as an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a bit like onion layers,” explains Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and drags the skin downward with it.”

You risk performing surgery on people that have deeper issues. It’s not advisable for an conscientious surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure 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 more traditional rhytidectomy involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We avoid placing stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting anonymously, says he would never use injectables in a client because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons 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 legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she needed to continue replenishing it – particularly when it began moving 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 needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour operation, plus a three-day|