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

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual causes associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent children, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to acquaintances and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” says the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s keen to stress, short-term – look is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, conducted by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, the previous 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’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just appear as if someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals choosing to undergo a facelift in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although 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 cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the top, then a layer of supportive tissue known as the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that’s what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger performing surgery on people that have underlying problems. It’s not a practice for an conscientious surgeon to follow

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are driving a new kind of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the United Kingdom; while a survey revealed that the portion of youthful candidates is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now performed on patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by figures including reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a conventional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments underneath, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched appearance occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting stress on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit allows for a authentic-appearing and longer-lasting outcome. It additionally implies that the procedure is no longer being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We receive numerous requests from clients aged 28 to 35 for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she reached her late 20s, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although research into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on injectables’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a client because of the dangers they present. “A lot of doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who produce injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she required to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before her operation, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I believe if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|