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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the typical causes related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but since it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the 30-year-old property agent from south Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – look is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an minimally invasive facelift, performed by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how puffy 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 look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of people choosing to have a facelift in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years before typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”

Understanding the Facelift Procedure

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer 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 becomes lax and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

You risk operating on people that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of slimming medications, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Statistics show an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the United Kingdom; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with one-third of procedures now performed on patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are now requesting to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a method evangelised by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to fashion designer Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

Where a more traditional facelift involves lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures underneath, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the deeper tissue, and preventing the taut, pulled look sometimes wrought by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin follows along 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 procedure is not just being used for the express purpose of anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and contouring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on undergoing a facelift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look young,” she says. “I did 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 where I’m at right now.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” states Grover, “but they move and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is preliminary, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been issued, and further research announced. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, commenting anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they pose. “A lot of surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after expressing worries.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning 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 nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a face and neck lift might be what she required to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he stated, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she recalls. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|