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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons associated with a house full of loud preteen children, but because it’s the initial occasion she will debut her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Obviously I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘Just so you know, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six cosmetic procedures, including an endoscopic mid-facelift, performed by a doctor in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I couldn’t even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m fine, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people electing to have a facelift in their twenties and thirties – well over a ten years before most doctors’ usual candidate age of forty to sixty. (Although most surgeons are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat heredity, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties asking for facelifts,” says London-based aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a very significant surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I observe people choosing it as a personal preference.”

Understanding the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that start to sag as we age. “Human faces are built a little like onion layers,” says Kent-based face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the SMAS. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the dermis down with it.”

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

Once the preserve of affluent seniors, overuse of injectables – when overuse of injectable gels stretches the face and leads to laxity in the skin – combined with the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, famous-figure-promoted surgical techniques are attracting a new kind of patient towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are now requesting to look like the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, 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 involves lifting the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift releases the underlying structures beneath it, allowing surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and avoiding the taut, pulled appearance sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the underlying structures,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block results in a more natural-looking and longer-lasting result. It also means that the procedure is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at least not at the age of 30. But long-term using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she reached her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear youthful,” she clarifies. “I did it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If dermal fillers completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is also the fact that in a sense, the face becomes slightly waterlogged because its capacity to drain bodily fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is preliminary, cautionary statements on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been issued, and additional studies announced. One highly regarded face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using injectables in a client because of the risks they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he adds, of plastic surgeons facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a list of recommended hotels in the city, sent to her by the clinic assistant at her surgeon’s office.

Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a cheek lift and a jawline surgery. The day before 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 under-eye bags.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the half-day surgery, plus a three-day|