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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the usual causes related to a house full of loud preteen kids, but since it’s the first time she will showcase her recently altered face to acquaintances and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not the way I appear,’” states the thirty-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, short-term – look is the result of half a dozen aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband became emotional when he viewed me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years before typical surgeons’ typical patient age range of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states London-based cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe individuals choosing it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Facelift Procedure

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of connective tissue known as the SMAS. Think of the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that is what causes aging; that is what becomes lax and pulls the dermis down with it.”

You endanger operating on people that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the development of novel, famous-figure-promoted operative methods are attracting a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports show an eight percent rise in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“Patients are asking now to appear as the best version of themselves and obviously the methods are following,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Deep Plane Technique

While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the deep plane facelift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to reshape the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a unified block allows for a authentic-appearing and more durable outcome. It also means that the procedure is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t undergo this because I desired to appear youthful,” she says. “I did it because the injectable harmed my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the injectable, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at right now.”

If dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has long been a debated topic 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 call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face gets slightly fluid-filled because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been diminished.” Although studies into the topic is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “A lot of doctors avoid talk about this, because the companies who produce injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s heard stories, he says, of plastic surgeons being landed with court orders after raising their concerns.

Decision and Procedure

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she felt as if she had to keep replenishing it – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida suggested that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. Two years later, she found herself choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d touched down solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will elevate the under-eye bags.’ He added, ‘I think if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, including a three-day|