When Melanie booked a consultation appointment with Beverly Hills board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon Catherine Chang, MD, she wasn’t set on getting a facelift. “I come from a family of women who have aged very naturally,” she tells me over Zoom. And while Melanie, who works in the beauty industry, praises the decision to age intervention-free, that simply wasn’t the path for her. That consultation appointment sealed the deal when it came to her future plans.
“Needs is a subjective term,” Dr. Chang says of her method for creating a custom procedure cocktail for her patients. Dr. Chang had Melanie look in the mirror and asked what she saw; Melanie called out her jawline and drooping eyelids as areas she wasn’t happy with. Then they settled on a plastic surgery recipe far longer than just a deep plane facelift: It also included a neck lift, a lateral brow lift, an upper blepharoplasty, and fat grafting.
The latter is especially new and exciting. “I began by creating a small incision inside the belly button so that it is not visible, then harvesting the fat [from the abdomen] to inject back into her face,” Dr. Chang says. “The patient specifically disliked the hollowness in her undereye area, so we added the fat in the undereyes, as well as the cheeks and temples.” Dr. Chang’s wait list is currently nine months to a year, so the wait was on.
Between that first appointment and the morning of surgery, there were a few appointments to confirm the details, but that was it. “The morning of, I showed up to the surgical center and Dr. Chang took out her surgical pen and drew all these lines on my face that were for the procedure,” she says. That famous Sex and the City scene where Samantha dips a toe into plastic surgery—and then sobs after looking in the mirror—comes to mind. But there was no running away for Melanie. “I didn’t have a mirror, but I felt comfortable because of Dr. Chang’s manner.”
Then she went under anesthesia and woke up—easy. Melanie was able to go home the same day because she had hired an in-home health care worker to stay with her. (Typically, you need to stay in a hospital overnight.) For the first 48 hours, her head was fully bandaged, a bit like a mummy, to control swelling. After that, she wore a head strap—think Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol—for a week straight. For the final week, the head strap was on for 12 hours a day.
“At first, I avoided mirrors,” she reflects. “It’s like you have made this decision to look and feel better or more confident, but in reality you’re walking around looking like Frankenstein. It’s really stressful, but you kind of have to laugh.”
While the physical appearance of the facelift during the healing process was stressful, Melanie says the pain was surprisingly manageable with medication. There was also what she calls a “pretty robust cleaning protocol” when it comes to wound care, which included daily doctor appointments, at-home wound washing, and fluid drainage. (Lest we forget Marc Jacobs’s famous postop selfie from 2021, which included fluid drains filled with…well, a whole lot of fluid.) “For the first three days after surgery, it felt like caring for myself was a 24-hour job, whether it was wound care or going to checkup appointments. I also really needed to rest a lot.”
The first time she saw her face without bandages was a bit of a revelation. “There was no other reaction to have other than, Wow, I look crazy,” she says with a laugh. “But I never had any worry or anxiety because my provider had prepared me for what to expect. I had to take pictures of my face every day to track the healing, but I deleted them immediately. I never want to see them again.” She took bromelain, an enzyme found in pineapples that helps quell inflammation, and soothed the bruising with topical arnica.
On day five, she had her first revelation. “While cleaning my wounds and looking in the mirror, I paused. That’s when I realized, Whoa, those are my old eyes staring back at me. These were not the eyes I had a week ago but the eyes I had when I was 20.”
After two weeks, all of the bandages were off, most of the bruising was gone, and Melanie was back to life as normal. When it came to plastic surgery transparency (a huge topic at the moment, with celebs like Kylie Jenner now dropping the deets of their breast augmentation), she’s chosen an ask-and-tell approach. “I didn’t really tell anybody beforehand because I didn’t want opinions,” she reflects. “But the last thing I want to be contributing to is ideals of aging that are just not grounded in reality. When people say things like I look different, I tell them what I did. But I don’t want to be marketing it to other people. Just because I got a facelift at 40 doesn’t mean everybody needs to or should.”
Obviously, she has no regrets about the experience. “I’m not surprised that I chose to get a facelift, but in my head it was always happening when I was 50,” she says. “But the deciding factor to do it now was Dr. Chang telling me that it’s better to do it now because younger skin is in better condition and heals better.”
