Leah has had botox and fillers before, but always been put off by the extemeness of surgery.
The 40 minute face lift you have while you’re wide awake
Lying on a bed, wide awake, I’m fully aware that my eyelids are being sliced open. I’ve already had three-inch cuts made on both sides of my head and had those stapled back together.
But this is no horror story. I can’t feel a thing and I’m remarkably chipper. In fact the doctor, who is, with enormous delicacy, removing a sliver of skin from each of my eyelids, has just asked me to stop chatting because it’s distracting him. After all, this is an operating theatre. Frankly, I’m surprised to find myself here. A few weeks previously, in my role as a beauty journalist, I’d been offered the chance to be one of the first women to try a new treatment — the T-lift, so called because it involves lifting the face from the temples.
This is a facelift, but not as you know it. There are no visible scars because the incisions are behind the hairline at the sides of the upper face. It’s performed when you are wide awake — without even sedation, let alone a general anaesthetic.
+5
Leah Hardy, 55, tried out a face lift with no sedation, bruising, swelling or bandages
There’s no bruising, no swelling, no bandages. Some patients go back to work almost immediately. One, I’m told, went back the very same day.
I’m having it done at EF Medispa, a discreet London clinic. I’d had Botox and fillers in the past, but the idea of surgery hadn’t occurred to me, mainly because it seemed so extreme. And I’m not alone in feeling this way.
An audit from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) found that there was a drop of almost 8