Denise Richards is getting real in a way we don’t usually see in Hollywood, opening up about her recent facelift and even sharing unedited before-and-after photos.
In a new interview with Allure, the Wild Things actress, 55, talked about going under the knife last June and why she decided it was time.
“I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” she explained. “It was three weeks after I did my breast surgery, and since I’d already taken a few months off to recover from that, I thought, I’m just gonna do the facelift now too. If I thought about it too long, I may have changed my mind. I would’ve gotten scared.”
While Richards is no stranger to cosmetic procedures, she said this was her first time doing anything to her face. She previously got breast implants at 19, but this experience felt completely different.
“I was terrified,” she admitted. “Being in the public eye since my 20s, people know what I look like — a facelift is not something that I could hide.”
After meeting with a few surgeons, she chose Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei to perform the procedure.
Photos shared with Allure showed Richards before surgery and again with surgical markings drawn across her face ahead of the operation. In those early images, her eyes looked more sunken and her jawline appeared less defined.
She also kept track of her recovery, snapping selfies just two days after surgery. In the first shot, her head is wrapped in a white bandage, with visible bruising on her neck, under her eyes and around her mouth. By day 10, most of the bruising had faded. Within about a month, she looked fully healed.
“It is night and day,” Richards said of the difference.
“It’s given me… Especially with what I’m going through in life, you know?” she said, referencing her recent split from ex-husband Aaron Phypers. “It’s just given me a new lease on life. It’s given me confidence. And people have asked me, if I wasn’t an actress, would I have still had it? And I would have.”
Richards has been open in the past about regretting her breast augmentation at a young age.
“At 19 when I first got my breasts done, I wish that I was confident enough with my body to not have had surgery,” she wrote on iVillage in 2011. “That is something that I really want to encourage in my daughters, to embrace their healthy body and have confidence.”
“My roommate had the best boobs ever, and she had just had hers done,” she told Howard Stern in 2009. “I was flat as a board, and I thought ‘Whoa, you can just buy them’ and stupidly had them done.”
Still, her overall take on cosmetic work has stayed pretty consistent over the years.
“I often get asked about my thoughts on plastic surgery, and I honestly feel it’s whatever makes a person feel good about themselves,” she said.
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