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I had a 'lunchtime facelift' and it was pretty great, actually
There’s a scene in Roald Dahl’s classic memoir of his childhood, Boy, where his mum takes him to the GP to talk about his chronically blocked nose.
Within moments, and without warning, the doctor flashes a shiny silver scalpel up into young Roald’s nostrils and slices out his adenoids, right there and then in the office. It’s a confronting image that has stayed with me ever since I first read the book in primary school – and it popped into my head recently during a visit to Sydney’s Duquessa Clinic, which specialises in aesthetic treatments.
I was there to talk to clinic owner Katherine Millar-Shannon about having something done around the brow area, *cough*. But the second she saw me, Katherine had already decided my forehead needed no work at all.
“Your brows are fine,” she told me. “They’re tight. They’re very youthful!”
I preened at this, but my moment of smugness was shortlived.
“It’s your jowls I’m concerned about,” Katherine went on, crushingly. “They’ve lost quite a bit of their elasticity.”
“Jowls?” I said, although not out loud. “I’m not old enough to have jowls! I’m barely even an adult! How could I have jowls?”
“Your jawline is quite loose here, and here,” she said, gently touching the offending parts.
“I’ll give you a jaw lift.”
And so, mere minutes after I’d walked in, I found myself lying on the treatment bed having local anaesthetic injected into the lower half of my face in preparation for a so-called “lunchtime facelift”.
Frankly, the name is a little misleading. Things you can do in your lunchbreak: Go shopping, eat lunch, maybe get a wax.
Things you really shouldn’t do in your lunchbreak: Get a facelift.
Yes, it was over relatively quickly – from start to finish, the entire procedure took less than an hour. But make no mistake, this is a serious enterprise. You can’t just swan in and expect it to be a piece of cake.
After I’d gone numb, Katherine took strands of what looked like fishing line, but was actually dissolvable stitch material, and threaded them under my skin from a point near my chin, all the way through to my temples. She then pulled these threads taut, and tiny ‘cones’ dotted along the threads popped up and anchored themselves into the flesh to stop the thread from falling back down again.
And that felt, and sounded, just as full-on as it sounds. This is not a project for the fainthearted. The experience of having someone sewing up the sides of your face like it’s a quilting project is really quite confronting.
Instead of heading straight back to the office, if I’d actually planned to do this I would have scheduled in some healing time and would have gone home to recover for least the rest of the day.
But you can see the results, below – my face shape was instantly different, and much more like it was when I was younger.
The aftermath was also pretty intense. I had a lot of swelling and major bruising – a full black eye that led several of my friends to ask me whether everything was ok at home (incidentally, these are the kind of friends you want), as well as not insignificant amounts of pain.
About two weeks after the treatment, things had mostly calmed down and my jawline felt tighter and smoother to touch.
The results are subtle, but I’m genuinely thrilled at the difference for that very reason. If they were any more dramatic it would be obvious I’d had something done.
Next time, though, I’ll book in a few days’ leave to recuperate from the shock.
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