Denise Richards Opens Up About Her Facelift

20.03.2026, 18:12 allure.com

Over the summer, a plastic surgeon hung old movie stills of Denise Richards on his operating room wall. There she was in Stormship Troopers, blue-eyed with the kind of bold brows and piecey layers that defined the ’90s. In a way, she defined the ’90s. Richards was a sex symbol in a decade that absolutely idolized sex symbols, the star of Wild Things, a Bond girl, and also had cameos on almost every era-defining show—Seinfeld, Beverly Hills 90210, Saved by the Bell, Melrose Place, Married… with Children. But back to that OR. Fast-forward about 30 years to this past June, and Richards, at age 54, had decided to get a facelift.

“I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” says Richards, who’s had about eight months now to reflect on her decision. It’s not the first time she has had plastic surgery—Richards had her breasts done at 19, and has had revision surgery for her implants since then. But, she says, it is the first time she’s had cosmetic surgery on her face. “I was terrified,” says Richards, well aware that the world has watched her age. “Being in the public eye since my 20s, people know what I look like—a facelift is not something that I could hide.”

Now Richards is opening up about her plastic surgery the way the rest of us talk about what we did Tuesday morning. She is matter-of-fact and unapologetic, discussing incisions, drains, and swelling. She’s sitting at home in front of scattered framed photographs, subtly made up with her long hair swept over one shoulder, and her daughter’s cat occasionally popping up into our Zoom. Richards is now best known for her roles on reality TV—she’s been on Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and had her own shows, including Denise Richards and Her Wild Things. Talking to her post-facelift, though, it’s hard not to think of her in the aughts, when she was in the news for her marriage, pregnancies, and divorce from actor Charlie Sheen—because she just looks so much like her younger self.

“It is night and day,” Richards says of her reflection before and after the facelift. “It's shocking, actually.” After she had the facelift, she adds, other celebrities “were more comfortable telling me about theirs, but I’m not gonna name names.” Still, she says, it can be good to know that “it’s not just serums and working out and lasers” that make people like her look younger.

Left, Richards in Wild Things, 1998. Right, Richards in The World Is Not Enough, 1999.

It’s not even just a facelift that makes Richards look younger. Her plastic surgeon Ben Talei, MD, says he also lifted the outer corners of her lips “to make the mouth look happier and sexier.” He performed “a very minor and conservative upper blepharoplasty,” he says, and a temporal brow lift “to correct the brow position.” He also repositioned “the forehead and temples back to where they used to be.” Dr. Talei used Richards' own fat, taken from her thighs and reintroduced in a thin, even layer underneath the skin on her face and neck, to brighten her complexion and make her look all-around smoother and healthier. And then there was the actual facelift. “She looks calmer, happier, brighter now—it's a character difference,” Dr. Talei says. “I really wanted to brighten her eyes back up to how they used to be—super sexy…. I love her face.”

It’s a good thing. “My face was in his hands,” says Richards, who gave Dr. Ben, as she calls him, carte blanche: “I said, ‘You’re the artist. Whatever you want to do.’” Now Richards is ready to share in her own words all the details about what it was like to get these surgeries, including a couple of big surprises (mostly the pleasant kind).

“I'm one who says ‘never say never,’ but I always said I would never get a facelift, because that's my face. This is how I make my money. I’ve been in this business a long time. People know what I look like. I've never done anything aesthetically to my face. This is my nose. I’ve done a little Botox. I've done very little filler—it made me look like I was heavy; it just did not work for my face. I’ve never touched anything [on my face] like that. If things go a little sideways when you do some other part of your body, you could cover it. So I was always scared of a facelift, but I did want to do my neck—my late mom would always say that she had a turkey neck. I think it's genetic. I had tried that [lifting] tape—a makeup artist showed it to me—and I'm like, ‘Well, if that's where I want it to go, why not just put it back there?’ It was something that I'd been thinking about for two years, going back and forth, and the last six months [before my surgery], I was like, ‘I have to do this.’

"I had consultations with some doctors, and then I met Dr. Ben [Talei] through my doctor who did my [reparative] breast surgery, Dr. Rob Cohen. I’d gotten injured on a TV show when I jumped off a bridge and the harness ruptured the capsules [around my implants], so I had to have surgery [last May]. I’ve had breast implants since I was 19, and truthfully, if I could do it all over again, I would not get implants. Young girls need to know that it's maintenance. You're putting in foreign objects, and your body could reject them. I was so flat-chested—I wish that I had the confidence back then to embrace the body that I had. Over the years, I've had to have many surgeries because of my implants, but I’ve never just had them taken out completely because that’s a big surgery. Last spring I wasn’t ready for that kind of recovery, so I chose to have them replaced. Dr. Cohen is incredible and he did a brilliant job.

[Editor's note: When implants are removed and not replaced with new implants, the patient may need a breast lift to address sagging skin, says Melissa Doft, MD, a plastic surgeon in New York City. The breast lift adds time to the operation, as well as scars around the areola and the front of the breast, she explains. Removing and replacing the implant, however, uses the same incision sites, and can be performed in under two hours.]

"Anyway, that’s what inspired going to Dr. Ben, because he’s in the same office. I was waiting in Dr. Cohen’s room, and there was a monitor showing all these before-and-afters [of facelifts by Dr. Talei]—I loved how the patients looked like themselves, but just refreshed. So it started with that.

"Dr. Ben started showing me what he could do—he’s like, ‘Tiny here, tiny there.’ It was a lot of little things…. He wanted to do the whole face and not just my neck. I was so scared to do that, but I thought, Well, if you're going to refurbish a painting, you don't do half a painting. Or when you remodel your house, it's like the one room looks great, but the rest of the house looks shabby. So I looked at it from that perspective, and I thought, Yeah, it might look weird that my neck looks good, but then it doesn't match the rest. So I just said to Dr. Ben, ‘I know I'm in good hands. Do your thing.’ And when I saw the before pictures he took, I was like, ‘Yeah, no—I do need a facelift.’

Before photos from Richards' first appointment with Dr. Ben Talei.

"It was three weeks after I did my breast surgery, and since I’d already taken a few months off to recover from that, I thought, I’m just gonna do the facelift now too. If I thought about it too long, I may have changed my mind. I would've gotten scared.

"I talked to some other actresses who had their faces done, and I was shocked that they did. I always thought it was something you do when you’re older—not our age. [Richards turned 55 in February.] One friend, she's very well-known, did not have her eyes done [when she got her facelift], and she told me, ‘Do your eyes. You will regret [not doing] it.’ And then my other friend, she's like, ‘You need to have a facelift.’ I talked to friends who had had facelifts or that I knew would support my decision. I didn't want to hear, ‘You shouldn't do this,’ because at that point I'd made my decision.

"My oldest daughters were not happy that I was doing it. [Richards has three daughters, who are 22, 20, and 14 years old.] But I think now they understand, and they see that I still look like me. I think they were just worried, in general, of [me] having surgery. They were telling me I didn't need it. I was too young. I told them that this is something that I want to do, and you may not agree with my decision, but I just want your support. I understand that you feel the way you do, but please know that this is something that I want to do for me.

"I didn't want [my daughter] Sami to get a nose job about two years ago. So when she said she didn't want me to get a facelift, she said, ‘Mom, you did not want me to get a nose job.’ I said, ‘Yeah, but you were 20 years old and that's your nose. That could change the way you look. For me, he's just putting things back where they were. I'm not trying to change the way I look; I'm just trying to put things back. There's a little difference, in my opinion.’

Richards in February 2025 with her two older daughters (left) Lola Sheen, 20, and (right) Sami Sheen, 22.

"But I understand her feelings. She said she wished she had my nose, but she got her dad's nose. I told her, ‘Your dad has a beautiful nose, and it looks beautiful on you.’ The pressure of having to look a certain way, that’s hard—but how do I defend all of it, you know? I didn't grow up with a mother that was in entertainment. I didn't see her on covers of magazines. My daughters would come to photo shoots with me. They've seen me being all dolled up. That was my job. It's hard for me to say ‘ignore the pressure,’ because I am guilty of being in a business where I talk about beauty, and show before-and-afters. So it's a fine line.

"About two weeks before we did the surgery, Dr. Ben had to dissolve filler in my upper cheeks, and I was shocked. I said, ‘I haven't done that in so long!’ It had probably been about a year and a half. I didn't know that stuff stays, by the way. I think all of us are learning that now.

"The morning of the surgery, right befor