Facelifts Are Kind of Great Now

Did she have work done? You'll never know

- KATHLEEN HOU

It started with a text in my group chat (doesn't it always?).

"Wow, [acquaintance name redacted] looks pretty great nowadays. What do you think she got done?" someone wrote.

A flurry of enthusiastic emojis came in reply, because speculating about beauty procedures in private is thrilling. This acquaintance looked lifted, but not stretched. Her cheeks looked bouncy, but not hard. Her eyes looked refreshed, without looking like she had a perma-wince. She looked better, not just different. We all threw out our best guess. Morpheus8.

New European fillers. Profhilo. She visited South Korea recently, I suggested. As she's the kind of person who would be flattered if I asked, I did. "Facelift, girl!" she texted me.

If you had to describe some of the facelifts done in the '80s and '90s, "pulled," "stretched-out," or "catlike" might come to mind. Today, it's more likely to be "pretty," "more natural-looking," and, in many cases, "virtually undetectable." Shani Darden, a facialist in Los Angeles, can find a tiny blackhead on a celebrity's skin, but even she tells me that the signs of a facelift are no longer telltale. "It's almost hard to find a person's scar, which I think is pretty amazing," she says.

We are in the age of "filler fatigue," according to doctors: the turning point when the overuse of filler has at the least become noticeable and, at worst, started making faces look strange: craggy cheekbones, puffy cheeks, and stretched-out skin. It's hard to tell what came first, the filler burnout or the rise in facelifts, but experts believe that the trends are interconnected. Vanessa Lee, founder of Southern California medspa The Things We Do, explains, "Twenty percent of my day is telling patients, 'No, this is not [going to work] for you.

You should probably look into surgery," she says. In recent years, doctors have noticed the average age of a facelift patient has shifted from the fifties to nearly a decade younger.