DID YOU GET A BARGAIN BASEMENT FACELIFT?

Newly rejuvenated celebrity faces and doctors throwing around fancy terms have jacked up prices for the ultimate cosmetic procedure. But you might not be getting what you paid for. Welcome to the bait-and-switch facelift crisis of the Upper East Side.

- DANIELLE STEIN CHIZZIK

It's 10:30 a.m. and Dr. Sean Alemi is about halfway through a seven-hour surgery in a private operating room on the Upper East Side, just off Fifth Avenue. Kendrick Lamar is playing in the background as he slides his scalpel down the left perimeter of the patient's face, having just finished meticulously stitching up the right side. He's accompanied in the room by another facial plastic surgeon, an anesthesiologist, a nurse, and an assistant, plus monitoring machinery and trays of gleaming tools. The patient, whose before shots are pasted on the wall over Alemi's shoulder, is 49, attractive, and suffers from the same condition that afflicts nearly everyone 40 and up in this age of social media and Kardashians: a face that looks good, great even, but also looks—despite all the skincare, the Botox, the restrained employment of filler—so much better in the mirror when you use your fingers to pull things ever so slightly upward, just enough to rid yourself of the jowls and nasolabial folds and general shifting down that middle-aged faces (especially those worn by thin people) are wont to do. Don’t pretend you aren’t doing this in your bathroom mirror too.

If this particular woman were to tell acquaintances that she was having a facelift, as well as a neck lift, lower eyelid skin pinch, fat grafting, and CO₂ laser—all part of the buffet of add-ons that often accompany a lift—they might think she was crazy, or at least a little aggressive. As mentioned, she looked good! She could surely have waited a little longer. But by doing it now versus 15 years from now, the improvement, she hopes, will be subtle—she’ll look incredible but she won’t scream facelift. By the end of the surgery, even knocked out on the operating table, even flecked with blood and beginning to swell, she looks pretty fabulous. Like herself, but sleeker. The result is somehow both astounding and understated.