FACE VALUE

I Got a Facelift From Denise Richards’ Surgeon and Love My Results

At 46, Britney Semler underwent a transformative procedure with a renowned Beverly Hills surgeon. Four years later, she has zero regrets.

In her mid-forties, Britney Semler noticed her face changing. She didn’t like the direction it was headed.

While many of her features had lost some fullness, she felt most self-conscious of her jowls. At 46, the skin on her lower face had lost elasticity, causing her cheeks to sag and affecting her neck. She noticed it quickly because she has “very fair, thin skin,” she told The Looker.

While many patients undergo the procedure in their fifties or early sixties, Semler didn’t want to wait until the changes in her face and neck were more pronounced.

“I wanted to address it earlier because I’m not a great candidate for filler, threads, or things like that,” she told The Looker. “By addressing it in my mid-forties, I felt I was able to achieve a much more youthful, rested look.”

In September 2022, Semler, a California-based content creator with 98,000 followers on Instagram, decided to undergo a facelift, hoping to look refreshed without looking “tight” or “pulled,” meaning too taut and overdone.

“I didn’t do this because I looked old, per se,” Semler said in a video posted August 6. “I did it because I didn’t want to wait until I was desperately needing it and it had to be so drastic.”

In the video, Semler explained her preference for making “little refinements” in her forties rather than a “full overhaul” in her fifties or sixties.

“In your forties, you have a little more elasticity in your skin, and that gives them a little more to work with,” she told her followers.

“The change wasn’t as noticeable because I didn’t wait until the aging had significantly progressed,” Semler, now 50, told The Looker.

Semler had the procedure with Dr. Ben Talei, a board-certified facial plastic surgeon at the Beverly Hills Center with over 15 years of experience.

His celebrity patients include actress Denise Richards, 55, and Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Sia, 50.

Sia publicly credited Dr. Talei with her 2023 facelift, while Richards shared the full extent of her transformation in August.

Semler first met Dr. Talei in 2021 when she underwent a lip lift, a popular nonsurgical treatment that uses Botox to enhance the lips’ appearance. She trusted his approach after seeing the results he achieved on several of her friends.

“They looked like themselves, just incredibly fresh and rested,” Semler said. “Even the scars were almost imperceptible.”

“I was terrified, but he did everything. He did the neck, the lower face, the upper [face], the brow lift,” Richards shared in an August 3 episode of Bunnie Xo’s Dumb Blonde podcast.

---

THAT MAKES CENTS

Denise Richards's Facelift Has Unexpected Effect on Surgeon

Roosa Rahkonen

---

“The only thing he didn’t do was my lower [eyelids]. He did my upper [eyelids]. But I mean, he did the whole thing.”

Semler, meanwhile, had a unique recovery companion: her best friend and What She’s Having podcast co-host, Jennifer Cataldo. The two women scheduled to have their procedures on the same day four years ago.

“Jen was in the morning, I pulled up, and she was being rolled out, and I was about to get all my markings done,” Semler recalled in an August 12 episode of their podcast.

The timing meant they also had someone who understood exactly what the other was experiencing during recovery.

“If you do have someone to hold your hand through this, it makes such a big difference,” Semler said.

The physical pain she experienced after the procedure was “much easier than [she] expected,” Semler told The Looker.

“For me, the more challenging part was actually emotional,” she recalled. “The one thing I wish I had done differently was wait longer before really looking at myself in the mirror. I was so anxious to see myself, and once I did, I became hyper-focused on every little thing.”

Just three weeks after surgery, Semler’s day-to-day looked relatively normal, and she was able to go back to work. But three months was the real turning point in her recovery.

“Dr. Talei had been very clear with me that the three-month mark was when I would really feel like I was back to normal, and for me, that was very accurate,” she said.

The surgeon’s approach to facelift surgery preserves a patient’s existing features rather than simply tightening the skin.

His signature technique, which he calls an AuraLyft, is a deep-plane facelift that works beneath the skin to reposition the underlying muscles and tissues.

“The major difference is that the AuraLyft corrects the face at all levels of aging,” Dr. Talei told The Looker. “My techniques address function, character, and appearance by treating multiple causes of aging rather than just one, which is what most other facelifts do.”

Dr. Talei elaborated on his approach in an August 19 episode of Semler and Cataldo’s What She’s Having podcast, explaining that some surgeons focus primarily on removing excess skin instead of addressing the underlying changes that occur with aging.

“When I do facelifting surgery, my goal isn’t just to clean up this, clean up that, which is everyone else’s goal,” he said. “If there’s extra skin, clean up the skin. It’s called a rhytidectomy, which means removing wrinkles. But the wrinkles aren’t there because the skin developed problems. The wrinkles are there because you lost volume.”

Dr. Talei said surgeons who focus only on excess skin may miss the underlying changes that caused the wrinkles and sagging in the first place. Simply pulling the skin can make wrinkles disappear temporarily, he explained, but it can also leave patients looking unnatural if they do not address deeper structures.

“Rather than figure out how these wrinkles came about—is it really a skin problem or is it something underneath?—they just say, ‘Let me just yank on these wrinkles,’ because when I do it with my hand, it goes away,” he said in the podcast.

He also cautioned against surgeons who remove skin from areas that have already lost volume with age, which can further change a patient’s appearance.

“These are surgeons who didn’t respect the aging process and what really happened, and all they do is double down on what they see,” he said. “They look like they have extra skin and they just take it out rather than saying, ‘That’s not what’s happening here. This is a loss of volume, a change of position.’”

“The results are truly astounding to the friends and families of patients who know their faces well. We are able to restore so much of what they used to look like rather than just performing a cleanup of some drooping things,” he told The Looker.

Four years later, Semler insists she has no regrets.

“I am beyond happy with the result and with how well it has lasted,” she told The Looker. “I would absolutely do it again in the future when Dr. Talei tells me I’m ready. I trust him explicitly. One of the things I love about him is that he won’t do more than he believes needs to be done.”

While she believes getting a facelift at 46 was the right decision for herself, Semler noted that “there is no magic number or ‘right age.’”

“It’s very specific to the individual,” she said. “Your genetics, skin texture, skin type, elasticity, collagen loss, hollowing, and other factors all play a role in determining whether you’re ready for a facelift. That individualized approach was very important to me.”

Play Video

---

Pia BelloBeauty & Wellness Intern

---

Got a tip? Send it to The Daily Beast here.