Denise Richards is breaking down her reasoning behind undergoing a full facelift in 2025.
“Originally I had been thinking about doing just my neck,” Richards, 55, told Bunnie Xo during the Monday, August 3, episode of the “Dumb Blonde” podcast. “Then a friend of mine — she’s very well-known and she’s not public about hers — and she said to me, ‘You have to do the whole thing.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do the whole thing.’ I was scared.”
Richards explained that she had previously undergone “a little botox” and “some fillers” but decided to meet with facial plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei.
“[It’s] like you remodel a house and do one room and the room looks great, but it doesn’t match the rest of the house,” Richards said of her analogy to plastic surgery. “So, I told him, ‘You’re the artist.’ His work was impeccable, I saw so many before-and-afters, and I just said, ‘Do what you want to do.’ I was terrified.”
Talei ultimately touched up “the neck, the lower face, the upper [face]” and a brow lift. While Talei didn’t touch her “lower lids,” Richards added that he “did my upper lid.” Richards noted that her brow lift was “no freaking joke” when it came to the pain, sharing that she “wasn’t prepared” for it.
“I’m numb just under my chin,” Richards explained, sharing that she had hers done one year prior to the interview. “I was told, ‘It gets better as you heal.’ And I’m like, ‘How? With gravity, how are we going to get better?’ And it does. It’s like your face settles or something. It was the best thing I did for myself.”
Richards, who previously said she wouldn’t go under the knife and get a facelift, shared that she ultimately changed her mindset.
“I always thought I wouldn’t get a facelift and I’m one that says, ‘Never say never,’” Richards said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m never getting [one] because I didn’t want to not look like myself.’”
In March, Richards got candid about her decision to undergo the procedure. “I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” Richards told Allure at the time, explaining that she “was terrified” of the procedure despite having breast augmentation at 19 and a revision surgery for her implants. “Being in the public eye since my 20s, people know what I look like — a facelift is not something that I could hide.”
