‘I Couldn’t Even Unseal My Eyes. That’s The Extent of the Swelling I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her daughter’s upcoming 13th birthday party. Not for the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen kids, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her new face to friends and extended family. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, well, a somewhat startling – her face puffed up and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, such as an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My spouse became emotional when he viewed me for the first time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via video call from her home. “I needed to inform him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Early Facelifts

According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a rising count of individuals electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – significantly before a ten years prior to typical surgeons’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We address heredity, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the facial area. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, also known as a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we age. “Our faces are built a bit like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Consider the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that is what loosens and sags and drags the skin down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the skin – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a different type of customer towards this invasive surgery. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is growing, 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 following,” says Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the deep plane facelift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” explains prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the entire soft tissue layer as a single unit results in a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “facial balancing” implied that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she clarifies. “I did it because the injectable ruined my face. I wish I had never done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be where I’m at currently.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the cosmetic field. “Research have shown that they seldom fully dissipate,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can block drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its ability to remove bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the area is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and further research announced. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, says he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the risks they present. “Many surgeons avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing legal actions after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, after beginning injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – especially as it started to migrate to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in the state proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. Two years later, she ended up choosing between a list of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her doctor’s clinic.

Originally, Preisinger had planned for an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the looseness she was experiencing in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a neck lift. The day before her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down solo in Turkey, she opted to include a lip lift. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ Thus I ultimately adding two more surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|