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

Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons related to a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but because it’s the first time she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to inform everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a somewhat surprising – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are eager to highlight the professional guideline of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds requesting facial lifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the facial framework as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what ages us; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost surgical travel, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are attracting a different type of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a study revealed that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“Patients are asking now to look like the optimal form of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a method promoted by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled look occasionally caused by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting result. It also means that the surgery is no longer being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “enhancement” and contouring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an attempt at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether injectable substances ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that not only do they rarely completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is also the reality that to some extent, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the lymphatic system have been issued, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a client because of the dangers they pose. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with legal actions after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep replenishing it – particularly when it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|