Denise Richards spent two years deciding whether to get a facelift — and when she finally did, in June 2025, it was her estranged husband Aaron Phypers who told the world first. He brought it up during divorce proceedings before she had a chance to say a word. So Richards did what she does: she took the story back herself, naming her surgeon, detailing every procedure, and explaining, on Jenny McCarthy’s podcast, exactly why a woman who built a career on her face decided to let a surgeon change it.
Five procedures, one goal: put things back where they were
Richards chose Dr. Ben Talei, a Beverly Hills surgeon known for natural-looking facial work, and she didn’t go in for a single tweak. The combination she underwent in June 2025 was deliberately layered: a deep-plane facelift, a temporal brow lift, upper blepharoplasty (removal of excess eyelid skin), a lip corner lift, and facial fat grafting — fat harvested from her thighs and redistributed into areas of the face that had lost volume over time.
The deep-plane technique is the centerpiece of that list. Unlike a standard facelift that pulls the skin tight and risks the stretched, wind-blown look that made earlier-generation celebrity surgeries so recognizable, a deep-plane procedure goes beneath the skin entirely — releasing and repositioning the underlying muscle layer (the SMAS) so the face moves back into a more natural position rather than being dragged sideways. The fat grafting works on the same logic: instead of adding heavy hyaluronic acid fillers that can migrate or look puffy, you restore the volume that’s already supposed to be there. Richards had said in interviews that years of Botox and dermal fillers had left her feeling less like herself, not more. other celebrities who’ve been candid about cosmetic surgery
The result, as her unedited before-and-after photos showed, was a face that looks rested and structurally similar to her younger self — expressive, not frozen. That distinction matters to an actress. Her own words on the subject: “This is my face. This is how I make my money.” Two years of research later, she concluded the risk was worth it.
Her ex brought it up in court. She decided to go public anyway.
The personal detail that sharpened the story beyond a standard celebrity makeover: Aaron Phypers, Richards’ estranged husband, raised the procedure in their ongoing divorce proceedings before she had disclosed it publicly. Rather than let the court record become the first draft of that story, Richards went on record herself — a move that earned her as much praise for nerve as for her surgical results.
By naming Dr. Ben Talei, sharing her recovery timeline (which included a post-operative care center offering lymphatic drainage and red-light therapy), and walking through her reasoning out loud, Richards turned a personal medical decision into a broader conversation about what cosmetic surgery in your 50s actually looks like when a woman does it on her own terms — not to satisfy someone else’s idea of youth, but to feel like herself again. That framing landed. Online response to her before-and-after photos skewed heavily toward admiration rather than criticism, which is not always the outcome when celebrities discuss surgical work.
- what to know about deep-plane facelift recovery
