‘My Eyes Were So Swollen I Couldn’t Even Unseal Them’
Onemanda Preisinger experiences worry about her child’s impending 13th birthday celebration. It’s not due to the typical reasons related to a house full of loud adolescent children, but because it’s the first time she will showcase her new face to acquaintances and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell all guests as they arrive, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” says the 30-year-old property agent from Southern Florida.
How she looks is, well, a little surprising – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though secured by heavy-duty 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 surgeon in Turkey’s Istanbul, the previous month. “My poor husband became emotional when he saw me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even open my eyes. That’s how swollen I was,” she explains to me via video call from her home. “I had to tell him: ‘Babe, I’m okay, I’m not hurting. I just look like someone jumped me.’”
Increasing Popularity of Early Facelifts
Based on plastic surgeons, Preisinger is one of a rising count of people choosing to undergo a rhytidectomy in their twenties and thirties – well over a decade prior to most doctors’ typical patient age range of 40 to 60. (Though many specialists are keen to emphasise the professional guideline of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have 28-year-olds asking for facelifts,” states based in London cosmetic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the facial area. “It’s a very significant procedure, and I’m a bit concerned when I observe individuals opting for it as a personal preference.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A rhytidectomy, alternatively called a facelift, elevates the ligaments in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Our faces are structured a little like layers of an onion,” explains Kent-based facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Skin and fat on the surface, then a layer of supportive tissue called the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Think of the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what ages us; that’s what loosens and sags and pulls the skin downward with it.”
You risk performing surgery on individuals that have deeper issues. It’s not a practice for an ethical plastic surgeon to follow
Once the preserve of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of injectable gels stretches the face and causes laxity in the dermis – alongside the common adoption of slimming medications, cut-price surgical travel, and the advancement of novel, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a different type of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an eight percent rise in facelifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of youthful candidates is increasing, with one-third of procedures now performed on individuals aged thirty-five to fifty-five.
“Patients are asking now to appear as the optimal form of themselves and obviously the methods are evolving,” says Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a method evangelised by everyone from reality TV star Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
Where a more traditional facelift entails lifting the SMAS, the comprehensive lift loosens the underlying structures beneath it, allowing doctors to reshape the face by moving the underlying layers, and avoiding the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing tension on the skin because we’re going below, to the underlying structures,” says prestigious London plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the underlying layers that is repositioned. The skin comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable result. It additionally implies that the surgery is no longer being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or revitalization, as the aesthetics industry describes it – but for “beautification” and facial restructuring, too. “We receive many inquiries from clients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this reason,” notes Grover.
Personal Journey
Preisinger had not intended on undergoing a facial lift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an effort at “symmetry correction” meant that by the time she entered her late twenties, she was “botched”. “I didn’t do this because I desired to appear young,” she says. “I underwent it because the injectable ruined my face. I regret ever using it. If I had avoided the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation right now.”
Whether injectable substances completely disappear has long been a point of contention in the aesthetics industry. “Research have shown that they seldom completely dissolve,” says Grover, “but they move and can obstruct lymphatic channels. A contributing factor to what we call ‘pillow face’ is additionally the fact that to some extent, the face becomes somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to drain lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Though research into the topic is early-stage, warnings on injectables’ potential impact on the body’s drainage have been released, and further research announced. An esteemed facial plastic surgeon, speaking anonymously, mentioned he would avoid using fillers in a patient because of the dangers they pose. “Many surgeons don’t want to talk about this, because the companies who make filler can be quite forceful.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing legal actions after raising their concerns.
Decision and Procedure
For Preisinger, after beginning using injectables, she felt as if she had to keep adding more – especially as it began moving to different areas of her face. She was only twenty-eight when a local plastic surgeon in the state proposed that a facial and neck surgery might be what she needed to finally step off the injectable hamster wheel. After 24 months, she ended up selecting from a list of recommended hotels in the city, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Originally, Preisinger had scheduled an upper and lower blepharoplasty – commonly called eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the right solution for the laxity 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 arrived solo in the country, she opted to include a mouth enhancement. “Subsequently the surgeon said, ‘We will lift the lower eyelid puffiness.’ Then he said, ‘I believe if we remove some buccal fat, it will contour your face.’ So I ended up including additional surgeries,” she says. She spent $22,000 (sixteen thousand five hundred pounds) for the six-hour surgery, plus a three-day|