“At first, I avoided mirrors,” she reflects. “It’s like, you have made this decision to look and feel better or more confident, but in reality, you’re walking around looking like Frankenstein. It’s really stressful, but you kind of have to laugh.”
While the physical appearance of the facelift during the healing process was stressful, Melanie says the pain was surprisingly manageable with medication. There was also what she calls a “pretty robust cleaning protocol” when it comes to wound care, which included daily doctor appointments, at-home wound washing, and fluid drainage. (Lest we forget Marc Jacobs’s famous post-op selfie from 2021, which included fluid drains filled with…well, a whole lot of fluid.) “For the first three days after surgery, it felt kind of caring for myself was a 24-hour job, whether it was wound care or going to check-up appointments. I also really needed to rest a lot.”
The first time she saw her face without bandages was a bit of a revelation. “There was no other reaction to have other than ‘wow, I look crazy,’” she says with a laugh. “But I never had any worry or anxiety because my provider had prepared me for what to expect. I had to take pictures of my face every day to track the healing, but I deleted them immediately. I never want to see them again.” She took bromelian, an enzyme found in pineapples that helps quell inflammation, and soothed the bruising with topical arnica.
On day five, she had her first revelation. “While cleaning my wounds and looking in the mirror, I paused. That’s when I realized, ‘Whoa, those are my old eyes staring back at me.’ These were not the eyes I had a week ago, but the eyes I had when I was 20.”
After two weeks, all of the bandages were off, most of the bruising was gone, and Melanie was back to life as normal. When it came to plastic surgery transparency (a huge topic at the moment, with celebs like Kylie Jenner now dropping the deets of their breast augmentation), she’s chosen an ask-and-tell approach. “I didn’t really tell anybody beforehand because I didn’t want opinions,” she reflects. “But the last thing I want to be contributing to is ideals of aging that are just not grounded in reality. When people say things like I look different, I tell them what I did. But I don’t want to be marketing it to other people. Just because I got a facelift at 40 doesn’t mean everybody needs to or should.”