It seems like everyone is getting a facelift these days. Not just women in their 50s and 60s, either. I'm hearing about it from friends in their late 30s, and nobody is whispering about it anymore.
Definitely not me. At least, not yet.
But I'll be honest. Small things have started to bother me, the kind of things I'm probably the only one who notices. My resting face used to be RBF. Now it's RGF and ROF: Resting Grump Face and Resting Old Face. The corners of my mouth have started turning down. There's a softness along my jawline that wasn't there before, the very beginning of jowls. I catch it in photos, in the car mirror, on FaceTime. And it bothers me.
When I say I felt nothing, I mean I actually felt nothing.
The Thread Debate. If you've spent any time on social media or at a Greenwich dinner party lately, you've heard about threads. People either swear by them or swear them off. There's very little middle ground.
What kept me on the sidelines wasn't the debate, though. It was fear. I've heard every horror story about how much the procedure hurts, and I am, without exaggeration, a complete wuss.
And then I met Dr. Sohrab.
Meet Dr. Mahsa Sohrab. You may remember my earlier piece on Dr. Sohrab. She's a plastic surgeon and a specialist in blepharoplasty, the eyelid surgery so many women credit for looking well rested. Her practice also offers a full menu of aesthetic treatments, and threads are one of them.
At my consultation, she walked me through her approach. She places eight threads, four on each side of the face. Her reasoning was the thing that won me over: you can't lift the lower face without lifting the midface first. The midface is the foundation of everything. Lift it, and the rest follows.
It was the first time anyone had explained facial aging to me in a way that actually made sense.
The Part Everyone Wants to Know About: Pain. I'm not going to lie. Pain is the reason I put this off for so long. But Dr. Sohrab takes pain management seriously, and she layers it: a topical numbing cream, a nerve block, and a pill that combines a sedative with an anti-nausea component. I also took a Xanax.
When I say I felt nothing, I mean I actually felt nothing. The only thing I noticed were the tiny pricks from the nerve block, and those felt like the pricks you get with Botox. That was it. That was the whole experience.
For a self-described wuss, that's the headline.
The Results. I saw the difference immediately. Not in a few weeks, not after everything settled. Right there in the mirror.
It took years off my face. The downturn at the corners of my mouth softened. My jawline looked like mine again.
Was I swollen? Yes, probably for a few days. But girls. Immediate. Results.
Why This Is Different. I have tried everything. Every laser. Every filler. I've spent years chasing small improvements. Nothing has come close to this.
My Advice. GO. Go now. Go before the holidays, so you're showing up to every party looking like the best version of yourself. Go before you start talking yourself into a facelift. Go before you do anything else.
And if you're scared like I was, tell Dr. Sohrab. She'll walk you through every step, and you'll wonder what you were so afraid of.
