On Sept. 5, 48-year-old Beverly Hills aesthetician Tricia Dikes texted a video to her longtime friend and plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei, bemoaning the way her aging face might look to a new beau in bed.
“What if I was having sex at my old age and I was on top of someone?” Dikes wryly complained while prodding at some loose skin on her cheeks. “This is what they see. It’s gross. Fix me!”
It was then that the pair decided it was time to turn the facelift plans they’d always joked about into a reality — and not just any facelift, but one of the most expensive, technologically advanced and hotly sought after procedures available in the elite Los Angeles enclave.
Dikes — a single mother who built her skincare business from the ground up over the last 30 years and caters to high-end and celebrity clientele — first met Talei in 2014 when he began practicing in Los Angeles in their shared office space.
Dikes recalled that she and Talei, who has since gained a reputation as one of the top-performing plastic surgeons in La-La Land, became close “really quickly.”
So when Talei watched Dikes’ “sex partner POV” clip, he agreed to give his friend an AuraLyft — a type of facelift he created that, with fees, would normally cost patients around $200,000 and can reach upwards of $350,000 when additional work is done.
“It’s definitely the most advanced in the world,” Talei told The Post. “It’s the biggest, most natural lift that rejuvenates the face like no other. No other surgeon can compare to the jawline partly because I invented the mastoid-crevasse technique that gained worldwide recognition. I also micrograft the neck to soften the skin and avoid that harsh, operated-on look.”
For Dikes, who was used to always “looking good for her age” and readily characterizes herself as vain, undergoing the procedure by her trusted pal was a no-brainer — no matter how involved the surgery or how scary the recovery might initially look.
“I felt like when I woke up in the morning I looked a bit tired, and needed to fix that,” Dikes explained.
Talei shared that the AuraLyft he recommended for Dikes is unique because it’s a maximized deep-plane facelift — an advanced technique that lifts and repositions deeper facial muscles and tissues, together with the skin. Any laxity within the smiling muscles, those around the eyes and mouth, is removed.
Before the face is elevated, Talei optimizes muscle function to improve the smile and its resting appearance, so he can actually “make the face at rest look less like a resting bitch face — less tired, less sad, less aged,” he told The Post.
“I tension the smiling muscles and drooping of the soft tissues back into position,” Talei continued. “If the area that the muscles attach to is loose, then the muscles don’t contract right. This is partly why our smiles changes with age and become more hyper-dynamic with more cheekiness.”
With the surgery, he also utilizes a fat grafting treatment where fat is harvested with a micro cannula from the thighs or abdomen and is then re-injected into the face for volume/cushioning. This helps him improve the skin quality and muscle function to decrease the need for Botox around the mouth and other facial areas.
Talai explained that the fat is harvested with a micro cannula from the thighs or abdomen and is then re-injected into the face for volume/cushioning, or is emulsified to nano-fat to take advantage of the mesenchymal stem cells that can improve soft tissue and skin quality.
“I know (Tricia’s) face, and she always wants an improvement, even though she doesn’t need one,” Talei said. “But now I saw enough mobility and laxity that in any position, she had the appearance of aging. Versus before, it was just in certain lights and views … When everything’s drooping down, that’s a good time to do it.”
The first step in turning back the clock on Dike’s face included two consultations. During those visits, the renowned surgeon dissolved leftover filler that she’d had done previously in Dike’s under-eye area to fully enhance the end results of the procedure.
He also gave her his typical rundown of what to expect before, during and after surgery — which involves being put under total intravenous anesthesia, waking up with a head wrap, and going to an aftercare center for a night or so before embarking on the recovery process.
“Over the next week, you might have a headache for the first day or two — otherwise, it’s not that painful of a procedure,” Talei said. “At a week, all your stitches are out. At three weeks, you’re going to look presentable … At three months, your twin won’t be able to tell because you look exactly like yourself, even though you have major changes.”
Dikes’ surgery process
When the day of Dikes’ surgery came on Nov. 4, 2025, her brother drove her to the Beverly Hills Center for Plastic Surgery at 7 a.m., where she went up to Talei’s office and had her face marked up for the operation.
It was also during that pre-surgery meeting with Talei where Dikes spontaneously decided to let the world in on her impending recovery process, agreeing to Talei’s last-minute idea to be filmed for occasional subsequent progress videos that would be shared on the plastic surgeon’s Instagram account.
“My thought was, why not?” recalled Dikes. “If it was going to help Ben showing the aftermath of a facelift and help him in any way, then I wanted to do it. I think it also helps other women and men who are going to do something like this to know what they are getting into.”
After her face was marked up and a pre-surgery video for Instagram was filmed, Dikes was then taken to the OR, where Talei and his associates kept her under the knife for 7½ hours.
After the procedure was complete, Dikes was transported to Pearl Wellness Center, a luxury surgical aftercare and post-surgery recovery facility where she spent two nights with a round-the-clock nursing staff that dressed her wounds.
The staff also administered pain medication, though Dikes recalls that “the pain wasn’t bad at all” and that she “didn’t need much meds”.
She did have a slight but consistent headache for around three days, and her ears felt a bit sore to the touch. Dikes also experienced some numbness from the bottom of her eyes, out to her ears and down to her jawline, which has dissipated approximately 65 percent to date.
Though Dikes wasn’t initially scared to see her new look after surgery, an accidental glimpse of her fresh, raw face while brushing her teeth at the wellness center gave her quite the shock.
“I just thought I’d come out of surgery and I might be a little swollen or look better, but I didn’t think I was going to look like that!” Dikes said with a laugh. “That shocked me. It didn’t help that my hair was all gooey and stuck to my head. I was like, oh my God — it looked terrible.”
“I didn’t even want to look again,” Dikes continued. “I looked like ‘Avatar’ — I looked crazy … It was a little frightening to see myself like that.”
Knowing that she had to put her full trust in the recovery process — which initially included slathering Aquaphor over her incisions three times a day and taking the occasional dose of Tylenol, along with steroid meds and an antibiotic — Dikes returned as best she could to living her normal life, going back to work after just five days.
There, she said that her skincare clients — many of whom knew she was getting the facelift and had expressed their concern over her “not needing it yet” — were nice about her healing appearance, though she suspects some of them may have still had reservations.
However, it was also around the five day mark that the veteran skincare maven began to see her freshly altered facial features — which to that point had been badly swollen and bruised — “really start shifting.”
“You could kind of see the swelling going down, especially around the eyes,” said Dikes. “It was (to the point) where you could kind of say, ‘Oh, I see where this is going. I can kind of see myself again.’”
A change of face
Between days five and 12 of her recovery process, “everything was shifting pretty quick,” Dikes recalled. The pain was non-existent by then, and she was allowed to wear makeup at the 10-day point, though she generally chose not to.
Progress started to slow at around the two-week mark, though changes like decreased swelling and bruise lightening continued to take place.
To monitor her results and take minor follow-up steps like taking out stitches, Dikes has been seen by either Talei or his fellow around five times since her initial surgery.
In the 70+ days since her AuraLyft, much has changed for Dikes — at least at face value.
“It’s just like you look refreshed — like nothing was done,” Dikes recalled of people’s reactions to her renewed appearance after the first two weeks (particularly some of those initially concerned skincare clients). “I’m, like, if you look at my neck, to me it looks so much better. My eyes look kind of back to how they were — brighter, a little cleaned up.”
Dikes’ face will visibly keep changing for roughly the next two months, Talei explained, though he noted that the bones will keep shifting internally for about a year.
“Between three weeks and three months, most people are living their normal lives,” Talei told The Post. “Other people generally don’t notice …Three months externally, you look spectacular — that’s when we take all our photos on our website. However, internally, you’re still healing for the next year.”
While Talei and his patients posting “after” photos on the Beverly Hills Center website or Talei’s personal Instagram isn’t uncommon, his and Dikes’ decision to document her surgical experience on video — from marking her face up prior to surgery to showing off her results days to months afterward — was made on the day of her procedure.
The comments on the clips of Dikes — most notably, the one taken two days post-AuraLyft that racked up 12,500 likes and a whopping 3.8 million views — have not always been kind.
“Holy cow, if I woke up and looked like that, I’d be horrified,” one commenter wrote, an opinion that got more than 3,300 likes.
“Why would she do this to herself?” asked another, preceding the comment with four crying-face emojis.
Others — particularly people who know Dikes IRL — have been more supportive.
Though Dikes appreciates the love she’s been getting about her rejuvenated look, especially in-person from friends, family and clients, she “doesn’t really care” what detractors say.
“It’s obviously coming from people who have their own insecurities, are extremely unhappy or jealous, or just a number of things,” Dikes said. “I don’t know what’s going on in their heads or in their world, but it doesn’t bother me.
“Now, if I were 25 or even 30, I think the comments would have bothered me a lot more,” she admitted. “But as you get older, you kind of just don’t give a s–t. You have your thoughts, but it’s not my reality.”
Talei is happy with Dikes’ progression and emphasized that the opportunity to operate on a best friend of 11 years invoked “nostalgia,” and looking at her now “brings back memories.”
“It’s not like you’re looking at someone who’s different or altered,” said Talei. “When you see her, you’re just like, ‘Oh, my God. You look exactly like the day we started.’”
“It feels great to look like the old me — it’s what I always looked like,” Dikes added. “For a couple years there, I saw myself aging for the first time and it scared the sh-t out of me. I’m vain, I know! But I wanted to see the youthful me in the mirror…I feel like myself again.”
