Wrinkles In Time

A year after her facelift, Holly Millea tells you what to expect when you’re not expecting bumps along recovery road. Relax. You get a beautiful visage—and, if you’re lucky, some superpowers, too.

- Holly Millea

I’m only half joking when I say that my headstone will read, “Here lies the body of a writer who never met a deadline she could meet.”

So what, you might ask, does this have to do with the one-year anniversary of my last Beauty Adventure, the one that required scalpels and stitches and staples and sedatives and several bottles of Christmas cheer: my brow lift and facelift?

Everything, because it has to do with time and the passing of that finite commodity, and how we choose to invest in it—or are too risk-averse to invest in it, leaving us without memories: Do you remember that time we…? Yes! Those were the days. As an old, much older boyfriend told a teenage me, “Get over your blues, baby. Time flies whether you’re having fun or not.”

Seemingly overnight, decades passed, and the next thing I knew, I was waking from a deep, anesthetized sleep in a Manhattan recovery room following four hours of nipping and tucking—a midlife bid to buy back time. Thanks a little to luck, and a lot to the sleight of hand of my plastic surgeon, David Rosenberg, MD, the results were magically subtle: I was not a new version of myself, just me… only better. No one will even suspect, Rosenberg had promised. “Unless you tell anyone.”

I told everyone. Though not at first. But my friends were telling everyone, so it was only a matter of time before an acquaintance ran up to me and said, “Oh my God! Have you heard? You had a facelift!” I wanted to get ahead of the not-fake news.

“Here’s to your face turning a year old,” my pal Germaine says, raising her glass of Burgundy. She leans in, studies my countenance. “I think that he adjusted the shape of your eyes somehow. And it’s beautiful—eyes are what define beauty. He’s very aware of those elements.”