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A CUT ABOVE THE REST

Denise Richards Posts Unreal Before and After Photos of Her Facelift

People on Reddit are calling her surgery “the best facelift” they’ve ever seen.

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

PublishedMar 23, 2026, 2:06 PM EDT

UpdatedMar 23, 2026, 2:06 PM EDT

Updated Mar 23, 2026, 2:06 PM EDTPublished Mar 23, 2026, 2:06 PM EDT

Facelifts are talked about more than ever before, yet an undeniable stigma still plagues women who choose not to “age naturally.” Actress Denise Richards wants to combat this—not simply by revealing she had a facelift, but also by sharing in-depth details of how it was accomplished and publishing before-and-after photos from every angle.

“I think it’s good...all of us growing up in the ’90s together, sharing information and being able to say, ‘Well, this is what I did,’” she told Allure. “It’s not just serums. It’s not just eating right and working out and doing all these lasers and stuff like that.”

Richards, 55, chose to undergo a full-face transformation in 2025. This extensive set of procedures included a facelift, a temporal brow lift, an upper blepharoplasty, a lip lift, and fat grafting.

“I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” Richards said.

In side-by-side snaps of her results on Instagram, the Wild Things star appeared lifted and rested, making her honesty about how she accomplished this all the more refreshing.

“I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” Richards said.

At first, Richards wanted only a neck lift, but changed her mind after a consultation with plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei, who performed Kathy Griffin’s jaw-dropping facelift in 2025.

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Her introduction to Dr. Talei was serendipitous: After rupturing her breast implants on set, Richards sought help from plastic surgeon, Dr. Robert Cohen. At his office in Beverly Hills Center for Plastic Surgery, she happened to spot photos of facelifts performed by Dr. Talei on a computer monitor. Floored by what she saw, Richards scheduled a consultation.

“Dr. Ben started showing me what he could do,” she recalled. “He’s like, ‘Tiny here, tiny there.’ It was a lot of little things…. He wanted to do the whole face and not just my neck.“

She continued, “I was so scared to do that, but I thought, ‘Well, if you’re going to refurbish a painting, you don’t do half a painting.’...So I looked at it from that perspective, and I thought, ‘Yeah, it might look weird that my neck looks good, but then it doesn’t match the rest.’”

“I always thought [a facelift] was something you do when you’re older—not our age," she said, only to learn through conversations with other celebrities that many her age had undergone the procedure.

Although many of her friends supported the journey, her older daughters reacted less positively.

Richards is a mother of three daughters, including Sami Sheen, 22, Lola Sheen, 20, and Eloise Richards, 14. Sami and Lola, whose father is Charlie Sheen, were “not happy” about their mother pursuing the invasive surgery, Richards recalled.

“They were telling me I didn’t need it. I was too young,” she said. “But I think now they understand, and they see that I still look like me.”

Prior to the surgery, Dr. Talei dissolved long-forgotten filler from her cheeks. “I was shocked,” Richards said, noting that it had been a year and a half since the last time she had filler. “I didn’t know that stuff stays, by the way. I think all of us are learning that now.”

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Dr. Talei said that in addition to a “very minor and conservative upper blepharoplasty,” he lifted Richards’s lips from the outer corners and performed a temporal brow lift.

Fat, too, was taken from Richards’s thigh, which he then turned into a paste and injected beneath the skin on her face and neck.

The results were immediate and striking.

“I looked like myself, but better,“ Richards said, adding that her only regret was not doing it sooner. “It’s changed my life in such a good way.”

After the surgery, she entered a dedicated recovery center where she received around-the-clock care and red light therapy.

The center tries to maintain privacy by keeping the clients from seeing each other.

“There was someone next door, I won’t say who she was, but I could hear her voice [and recognized her],” Richards said.

Richards’s transparency—and her results—quickly gained praise online.

On Instagram, people praised Richards for being so open about her journey.

“Bless her for showing us that she did this instead of pretending it’s olive oil and yoga,” one commenter wrote, adding, “Now we can all start planning and saving!”

On Reddit, commenters were swooning over her natural results, which they thought made the actress look like a younger version of herself.

One comment with over 1,000 upvotes simply read, “That’s the best facelift I’ve ever seen.”

Roosa RahkonenReporter, The Looker

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