‘I Wasn’t Able to Even Open My Eyes. That’s How Swollen I Was’

Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s upcoming 13th birthday celebration. Not for the usual reasons associated with a home packed of loud preteen children, but because it’s the first time she will reveal her recently altered face to friends and extended family. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I appear,’” says the 30-year-old real estate agent from Southern Florida.

How she looks is, admittedly, a little surprising – her face swollen and preternaturally lifted, as though secured by heavy-duty tape. Her new – and she’s eager to emphasize, temporary – appearance is the result of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, last month. “My poor husband teared up when he saw me for the initial time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she tells me via online call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m fine, I’m not in pain. I just look like someone jumped me.’”

Increasing Popularity of Youthful Facial Lifts

Based on cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is one of a growing number of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – significantly before a decade before typical surgeons’ 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 requesting facelifts,” says based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a ex-NHS doctor who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a bit concerned when I see people opting for it as a lifestyle choice.”

Explaining the Rhytidectomy Surgery

A rhytidectomy, also known as a rhytidectomy, lifts the tissues in the face that begin to droop as we age. “Our faces are built a little like onion layers,” says based in Kent face specialist Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a stratum of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the soft tissue skeleton of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the dermis downward with it.”

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

Once the preserve of moneyed older people, overuse of injectables – when excessive use of dermal fillers stretches the face and causes looseness in the dermis – alongside the widespread use of weight-loss drugs, cut-price medical tourism, and the advancement of new, celebrity-endorsed operative methods are attracting a different type of patient towards this invasive surgery. Statistics indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a survey found that the portion of younger facelift patients is increasing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged thirty-five to fifty-five.

“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are following,” comments Orfaniotis. Currently, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.

Advanced Lifting Method

Where a conventional rhytidectomy entails elevating the superficial layer, the deep plane facelift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, enabling doctors to restructure the face by repositioning the underlying layers, and preventing the tight, stretched look occasionally caused by more traditional techniques. “We’re not putting tension on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” says Harley Street cosmetic doctor Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The dermis follows along as a passenger.” Elevating the whole facial structure as a single unit 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 anti-ageing – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry terms it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting numerous requests from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” says Grover.

Personal Journey

Preisinger had never planned on getting a facial lift – at minimum not at the thirty years old. But years of using hyaluronic acid dermal fillers in an effort at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t undergo this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable harmed my face. I regret ever done it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t think I would be in this situation right now.”

If injectable substances completely disappear has historically been a point of contention in the cosmetic field. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they move and can block drainage pathways. One of the contributors to what we call ‘puffy appearance’ is additionally the fact that in a sense, the face becomes somewhat waterlogged because its ability to drain lymphatic fluid has been diminished.” Though studies into the topic is preliminary, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies initiated. An esteemed face specialist, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would never use fillers in a patient because of the dangers they present. “A lot of surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who produce filler can be pretty aggressive.” He’s heard stories, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.

Choice and Surgery

For Preisinger, once she started injecting filler, she believed she had to keep adding more – particularly when it began moving to other parts of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a nearby cosmetic doctor in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift might be what she required to exit the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she found herself selecting from a selection of recommended hotels in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.

Initially, Preisinger had planned for an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called blepharoplasty – but her surgeon advised her that a facelift was the correct option for the looseness she was finding in her face. She booked a forehead lift, a mid-facelift and a neck lift. The eve of her surgery, 24 hours post she’d touched down alone in Turkey, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I think if we remove some cheek fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up including additional procedures,” she says. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|