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

Onemanda Preisinger is nervous about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the usual reasons associated with a home packed of clamorous adolescent kids, but since it’s the first time she will reveal her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not the way I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.

Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though held together by industrial-grade tape. Her altered – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – look is the outcome of half a dozen 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 first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That indicates puffy I was,” she explains to me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone attacked me.’”

Growing Trend of Youthful Facial Lifts

According to plastic surgeons, Preisinger is among a rising count of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Although many specialists are keen to emphasise the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not age.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who focuses on the head and neck. “It’s a major procedure, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A facelift, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that begin to droop as we grow older. “Human faces are structured a little like onion layers,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a layer of connective tissue called the SMAS. Think of the facial framework as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis down with it.”

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

Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and causes laxity in the dermis – combined with the common adoption of slimming medications, 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 show an eight percent rise in facelifts over the past 12 months in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with one-third of procedures now conducted for patients aged 35-55.

“People are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and naturally the methods are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the operation du jour is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by everyone from Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

While a conventional facelift involves elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by moving the deeper tissue, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re going below, to the deeper tissue,” says prestigious London cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who specialises in the deep plane technique. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Elevating the entire soft tissue layer as a unified block allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It also means that the surgery is not just being used for the express purpose of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.

Individual Experience

Preisinger had not intended on getting a facial lift – at least not at the age of 30. But years of using injectable gels in an effort 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 young,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be where I’m at currently.”

Whether dermal fillers ever fully dissolve has historically been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Studies have shown that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can obstruct drainage pathways. A contributing factor to what we term ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face gets slightly waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the area is early-stage, cautionary statements on dermal fillers’ possible effects on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research initiated. One highly regarded facial plastic surgeon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many surgeons avoid talk about this, because the companies who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” 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 felt as if she needed to continue adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she needed to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a selection of suggested accommodations in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her doctor recommended that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her operation, one day after she’d arrived alone in the country, she opted to include a lip lift. “Then he stated, ‘We will elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ Thus I ultimately including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the half-day operation, plus a three-day|