I had £20k facelift at 42 after mortifying moment – my old face was thrown in the bin & now men in their 20s chat me up
ONCE upon a time, “work” meant a boring 9 to 5.
Today, in my world, it means Botox, filler, polynucleotides, Profhilo, micro-needling and… facelifts.
Which is why, at the age of 40*, I found myself supine under the surgeon’s scalpel.
Yep, I’ve had a facelift (full transparency, also a neck-lift).
And I’m not alone.
******* *******, **** *******, ***** *****, **** **** and ***** ******: all A-list British superstars who have had secret facelifts.
Except I can’t name them due to a tedious thing called “medical privacy”.
In an online world where women – and men – are under unprecedented pressure to look good, ageless celebrities and influencers are fuelling the myth that they, somehow, are better than the rest of us by virtue of a snatched jawline. They’re not.
In most cases, they’ve spent tens of thousands of pounds to look this way, but won’t come clean for fear of eroding the facade, or tarnishing the brand. And, in my book, that’s not fair.
(Indeed, two stars semi-outlined above pre-recorded Instagram posts to upload whilst they were recovering from surgery).
So how did I get here?
Sunbathing, crash dieting and a skin care regime that can, at best, be described as slap-dash.
To paraphrase Baz Luhrmann, if I could offer you one bit of advice: wear sunscreen. Really. Do.
As someone who’s always looked young for their age, suddenly I didn’t.
I developed a jowl. My crows’ feet tapered down to my mouth.
And in selfies (yes I’m still a millennial), my neck was crepey and wrinkled. In a photo taken days before my op, I zoomed in was genuinely devastated to see the neck of an octogenarian staring back at me.
On nights out, people stopped asking my age.
I no longer got attention in bars which, as superficial and pathetic as it sounds, I missed. That old adage rattled out by middle aged women started to apply: I felt invisible.
But not so invisible that at Waterloo station, a salesman from Scottish Widows didn’t veritably leg over and thrusting some forms in my hand. Evidently I was looking of pensionable age.
The next day, I booked in with Mr Paul Tulley.
For £20,000, I wasn’t convinced I wanted to simply look rested. I wanted foetal.
Surgeon to the rich, famous and very successful, I contacted him after seeing his work on Instagram.
It looked subtle and understated; not a bride of Wildenstein in sight, God bless her cosmetic soul.
My first consultation took place last May in his Harley Street clinic, where I enquired about a mini-facelift – a procedure requiring just a couple of stitches, and minimal downtime.
“No, you’re beyond that I’m afraid,” he said. “You need a deep-plane face and necklift.”
Oh.
Mr Tulley, it seemed, was not a man for small talk.
He stood me in front of his full-length mirror, and gently pulled up the skin on my sagging visage, explaining I’d lost around two centimetres of laxity.
“With surgery, we can fix this,” he reassured me.
“By re-suspending and reshaping the deep tissues, together with re-draping the skin and trimming the excess without tension, we can take the face and neck tissues to where they were 10, 15 years ago.
“You have good bone structure, and I’d expect an excellent result. People won’t know you’ve had surgery, they’ll just think you look well rested or like you’ve been on a long holiday.”
For £20,000, I wasn’t convinced I wanted to simply look rested. I wanted foetal.
Six weeks later I had a second consultation, and asked a few more questions: what was the down time? (one night in hospital, two weeks rest, no gym for three weeks), would surgery improve the condition of my crepey, sun-damaged skin? (yes), would I look fake? (no), would it hurt? (no, because drugs) and could I still walk the dog? (gently, short walks).
When I got home, obviously I Googled “death rates + facelift”.
The results were pretty reassuring. Of course, as with any procedure performed under general anaesthetic, there are risks – but the biggest seemed to be hematoma, which is basically clotted blood, or some temporary nerve damage.
At this stage though, surgery still all sounded like some sort of vague, amorphous concept that would never come around.
But working in showbiz, writing day-in, day-out about the young, beautiful and Botoxed – and then seeing myself back on camera on the occasional TV thing – was making me feel increasingly sad.
I found myself avoiding photos with friends, wanting to go out less and turning down on-camera work.
I was also spending a small fortune on various “tweakments”.
Botox and filler (around £450 each a pop), Morpheus 8 (£1200 for a course of two, excruciatingly painful, did absolutely nothing), Profilho (£650 for two sessions, only lasted four months), trout sperm (£800 for three, bad bruising) and Sculptra (£750, useless).
So not only was I spending around £5,000 a year trying (and failing) to reverse time, I was still feeling crap about myself.
The idea, then, is that by having surgery I will have effectively paid if off after four years – as well as saving countless hours trudging to Harley Street after work.
Pre-op, I was given a £285 course of Skinade MD – capsules, and two types of sachet drinks which were to be necked daily.
Containing a mix of collagen peptides, vitamins and L-Lysine, the idea was to reduce swelling and expedite healing from the inside-out.
I found myself avoiding photos with friends, wanting to go out less and turning down on-camera work.
Clemmie Moodie
Wednesday 13 November was D-Day. Checking into the super-smart Weymouth Street Hospital in central London, and shown to my own suite, Mr Tulley went through the surgical process once more, and marked me up.
Last minute, we’d decided to give me a nano-fat graft for under my eyes – a process involving fat being taken from my tummy and thighs and whacked in around the wrinkled hollows to the windows of my soul. In for a penny, eh.
With Dan the photographer merrily snapping away, I was wheeled down to theatre at 2pm for general anaesthetic, administered by consultant anesthetist Ravi Bhagrath. (“A little prick, and it’ll feel like you’ve drunk three glasses of fine champagne very quickly” he said, entirely speaking my language).
Five and a half hours later, groggily I came around.
It was done. The worst was over. I was alive.
‘HAPPY FACELIFT DAY!’
Back in my hospital room, off my tits on morphine, I took a selfie and promptly sent it to my team at work, my friends and family, my boss, my dog-walker, and Robbie Williams.
The latter replied with a dulcet-toned voice note, singing “Happy facelift day!” to the tune of happy birthday.
That night, a wonderful, wonderful nurse called Suzanna tended to me, changing my sodden bed sheets (general anaesthetic causes the body to sweat excessively).
The following day Mr Tulley removed my bandages, and said the op had gone well. During it, he’d also removed two and a half centimetres of loose skin from my neck. (Inexplicably I asked him what he’d done with said skin. “The bin”.)
With trepidation, I looked in the mirror.
Honestly? It was like I’d jumped in a mystical time machine and gone back 12 years.
My baby skin was back!!! Not a single jowl in place. The lines around my eyes were visibly reduced.
“Look at my beautiful neck!”, I started telling anyone who would listen.
My neck, which has been causing me so, so much angst was the neck of my 28-year-old self.
HEALING JOURNEY
The next few nights I was to sleep on my back, with my head propped up on three pillows. I was packed off with enough drugs to fell a rhino and ordered not to move around for the first 48 hours.
By day three, I was in Gail’s cafe meeting my best friend for coffee, and taking the dog for a walk.
By day four I was back at work, albeit remotely. By day five I was doing 10,000 steps a day, and scrubbing the house.
Such is Mr Tulley’s artistry I didn’t get a single bruise, and the scars behind my ears are barely visible to the naked eye.
The only painful bit came from an infection which saw me in agony on night five, crying at 4am with piercing ear ache.
It turns out my left ear got wet during a shower, but a quick trip to A&E and one steroid injection to the bum later, I was right as rain.
My stitches were removed after a week, and no-one batted an eyelid as I marauded around the capital in a fetching nude stocking headdress.
Three weeks after surgery I enjoyed a six-hour boozy work lunch. In a bar that night, two 29-year-old blokes chatted me up.
Seven weeks post-op Mr Tulley sent me to top aesthetician Aga Kopanska, at Art of Beauty in Belgravia, London – an expert to whom he sends all his clients.
A facial magician, she gave me three sessions of microneedling, exosomes, some blue and red light treatment, polynucleotides and dermaplaning. Within 10 days, a tiny patch of crepey skin had disappeared and my pigmentation had disappeared.
Just before Christmas I went to Piers Morgan‘s festive party and had at least four celebs asking what I’d had done. I gave two, who shall remain nameless, Mr Tulley’s contact details.
Whilst facelifts were once the preserve of 70-year-olds, now more and more “youngsters” are getting them.
There are over three and half a million #facelift hashtags currently circulating on Instagram and TikTok, with more and more influencers posting about their “deep plane journeys”. It’s already HUGE business in California, New York and Texas, and increasingly becoming more here.
Writing this two months on, life has returned to normal… only now I have the skin of my 34-year-old self. And my 34-year-old confidence has returned.
My left eye is still puffy from the fat transfer and yes, it’s been bothering me. But I’m assured it will settle down with a bit of self-massage.
I hope, in coming clean, I help at least one person currently feeling insecure about their looks
Clemmie Moodie
(Confession: upon seeing my photoshoot “after” pics, I asked Dan the photographer if he could possibly “touch-up” the offending left eye area and he – quite rightly – refused. So yes, it’s not perfect yet, but it’s better).
In writing this piece, and breaching my own medical privacy, doubtless I will get trolled.
“You can’t polish a turd!” and “you vain b****, there’s a war going on!”, etc, will be the gist of the online abuse. And that’s fine.
Perhaps feminism isn’t just socio-economic and political equality for women. Perhaps, just maybe, it’s about doing something entirely selfish and decadent for no-one but you. And then owning it. Because you can.
For me, that’s a teeny-tiny bit empowering.
I hope, in coming clean, I help at least one person currently feeling insecure about their looks.
Whilst some friends haven’t noticed a thing. I notice. Even if it’s entirely psychosomatic, I really don’t care.
In short, I feel like me again. And that’s all I ever wanted.
- *42