‘I’ve never tried surgery before... is this who I am?’ Why I had an eyelift, by Polly Vernon

Cosmetic surgery is replacing fillers and Botox – but is it worth the risk? Polly Vernon goes under the knife to find out.

I sit in the waiting room of Dr Elizabeth Hawkes’s consulting suite and surgery, a converted, gracious town-house situated near Sloane Square in Chelsea. It is 7am and I am nervous. Abiding by the clinic’s instructions, I haven’t eaten — even drunk any water — since the night before. This is for the purposes of anaesthesia.

Oh God! I will be having anaesthesia.

A nurse collects me and takes me downstairs to the basement, where a selection of operating theatres is located. We go into a tiny anteroom where she preps me: weighs and measures me, checks I’m not (among other things) pregnant/haven’t recently taken ketamine (no, and indeed, no). She gives me a hospital gown, towelling slippers, compression stockings to guard against clotting and a surgical hair cover.

Oh God! I will be having surgery.

“I’m a bit nervous,” I tell her.

“Of course you are,” she says. She smiles. “But you will be absolutely fine.”

She leaves. I get changed. My anaesthetist appears, confirms I’ll be having sedation — the lighter alternative to general anaesthetic — as discussed with my surgeon. “Yes,” I say and (just about) stop myself from asking him to double-check my measurements again to make quite sure I get exactly the right amount.

He leaves me. My surgeon, Hawkes, replaces him. I’m glad to see her, she’s very calm and competent and really all the things you need from a person who is to set about you with a knife. She marks up the part of me on which she will operate, asks if I have any questions, tells me she’ll see me in surgery.

At 8am the nurse comes back, leads me to an operating theatre, small and gleaming and bustling with people. I realise this is the last time I can back out ... and that I don’t want to. I might be nervous, but I am also determined. I get up onto the operating bed. A second nurse asks what music I’d like to listen to.

“It’s surely more about what you lot want to listen to?” I say, but she insists.

“I love Taylor Swift,” I say.

“I love Taylor Swift!” another nurse says.

The opening chords of Cruel Summer play through a speaker; I feel instantly better.

The anaesthetist arrives. Everyone seems happy to see him, which makes me think he’s probably a nice bloke who hasn’t OD’d anyone by accident. He lifts my left hand.

“Sharp scratch,” he says...

... and inserts the canula, through which anaesthetic will enter my system, into the back of my wrist. A wave of gorgeous relaxedness sweeps over me. I do not make it to the second verse of Cruel Summer, consciousness-wise. I am oblivious to when Hawkes comes into the room and removes 10mm of flesh from each of my upper eyelids.

...

Blepharoplasty is the official name for this cosmetic procedure. All signs — all the trend reports, all the Google searches, all the inquiries and stats on operations so far — seem to indicate that it is the plastic surgery procedure of 2025.

An article published by the American Board of Cosmetic Surgery in January testified to an increase in patients in their forties seeking it — this, it noted, was part of an overall trend toward more natural aesthetic interventions and a related decrease in the popularity of fillers (which can look far from natural). In the industry, this is known as a “quiet facelift”. In late March — just two weeks after I’d had my procedure — the Harley Street plastic surgeon Dr Yannis Alexandrides confirmed that he too, had seen “a noticeable increase in the popularity of blepharoplasty, also known as an ‘eyelift’”.

Whispers about which celebrity definitely just had it reverberate around beauty and showbiz gossip circles like pinballs; TikTok surgeons speculate over the potentially altered famous faces of ... Oh, you know!“* “just got it,” my friend the entertainment editor whispered to me at a party. “She was back on Insta after three weeks and no one noticed!

This is interesting because until pretty recently — last year or thereabouts, when facelifts began being discussed and debated again — surgery itself appeared to have fallen out of fashion. Injectables like Botox, medical facials, microneedling, platelet-rich plasma therapy and so forth had dominated the conversation. Surgery seemed dramatic and old-school; why bother when you could get a little zhuzh needled into your face and body with minimal downtime?

Yet, quite suddenly, surgery in general, and blepharoplasty in particular, are all anyone is chatting about.

None of which is why I had it, of course. I love a fad, me — but not when it comes to operating on my own face. Although: maybe there is something in the air, in the general conversation, which persuaded me to finally go for it?

Blepharoplasty is definitely something I’ve been thinking about on and off for years. In my latest thirties, earliest forties, I noticed a downward trending in my eyelids. A few years after that I’d seen some creping in the same skin, especially visible in photographs. I stopped wearing iridescent eyeshadow on the upper parts of my eyelid because that made it more obvious. Then I noticed shlumpy pockets near the outer corners, which got in the way of my eyeliner wings. Then bagging above the inner corners. And so on.

I need to emphasise, it wasn’t a huge deal for me. It niggled me in selfies; I learnt how to angle my face to disguise it. But it wasn’t ruining my life. I didn’t hate myself because of it. I don’t hate myself because of anything. I just did think I could probably do without it.

So, one afternoon in late January, I went to see Hawkes in her consulting rooms, upstairs from the very operating surgery where she would eventually treat me. Hawkes is gaining a reputation as one of the very best at bleph (which is what we call it, because “blepharoplasty” is hard to say, never mind spell). She is a blepharoplasty expert, eye surgeon and aesthetic doctor: Botox, undereye filler and so on. Eyes are what she does — they’re all she does. She is devoted to them, healthwise as well as aesthetics-wise; she worked within the NHS for years.

When I first meet her, she tells me:

“Nothing is going to go wrong, but if it did ... I’d be precisely the person to fix it.”

... which I think is probably when I decide I am definitely going to go for the operation. Though it might also have been around the time she shows me her (consenting) patients’ before and after pictures.

“Wow!” I say, because the difference is incredible. Both delicate and dramatic.

“What’s good about it,” Hawkes explains, “is that it doesn’t fundamentally change the shape of the face. It’s still your face, just ...”

I look at another before and after of a woman who looks fresher, more cheerful, more awake — like the whole of the upper half of her face has been reopened up to the world in her after picture.

“Just... shit loads better?” I say.

Hawkes laughs and asks me to lie on the consulting bed so she can take some measurements. She explains exactly what the operation entails: first, she’ll mark up my skin precisely. When I’m under sedation she’ll use local anaesthetic on the eye area itself, to reduce bruising and swelling after the op.

She will then remove the skin from the upper lids (or the lower lids, or both). The maximum she can take from anyone’s upper lids must leave 20mm of flesh, so that the eye can still close; she then tells me that, allowing for those 20mm, I have a good 9-10mm that can safely go. She also tells me she’ll be able to reduce the pouches of skin above my inner eye corner. These are apparently prolapses of orbital fat, pads not unlike the ones that cause undereye bags.

On the subject of which, she tells me, I have no need for lower-lid blepharoplasty (which I sort of already knew). She will then close the wound with stitches, which need careful care for a week after the procedure, at which point she’ll remove them.

“Any questions?” she asks. “What are you most worried about?”

“Dying on the table, and looking weird,” I say. “And not necessarily in that order.”

She tells me that’s what most people say, and that I won’t — and I won’t.

She also tells me that the surgery lasts about an hour, that I can be in and out of the clinic within a morning, but that I’ll need to be released into the care of a chaperone, which means, yes, I will need to tell my boyfriend, and that I’ll need three weeks off exercise when I’m healing (which is the only thing that really gives me pause; I love training). Hawkes will sign me off completely six weeks after operating on me.

“It is a relatively easy procedure,” she says. “It’s one of, if not the easiest. But it is still surgery. So go home and think about it.”

I go home and think about it. I have never had cosmetic surgery before. Can I really reconcile my sense of myself with the idea that I’ve gone under the knife? Is that who I am?

I’ve had tweakments for much of the past decade. Botox, fillers, polynucleotides, Profhilo and more. When I first started on that particular odyssey I definitely had to do some thinking about whether it was morally and ethically justified, whether or not a feminist could, in good faith, get tweaked. Shouldn’t I just accept who I was, how I looked, how I was ageing?

I ultimately concluded that, because feminism (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) is about what you do for other women, not what you do to your own face, it was fine.

Did it really matter if I had a lightly Botoxed forehead and a smidge of filler in my temples when, in 2017, I marched in Dublin for Ireland’s abortion rights? I couldn’t see that it did. But surgery is a bigger deal, a more invasive deal — and therefore requires some further negotiation with my own private kind of feminism.

I weigh it up and eventually decide that we are, all of us, operating with different lines drawn in the sand. Aren’t we? For some of us, colouring our greys is a betrayal of the sisterhood. For some of us, it isn’t. This is just another line.

Ultimately I want this. I really do. By the time Hawkes’s assistant Ellie calls me, after a 48-hour cooling-off period, to check if I want to go forward, I know categorically that I do.

Actually: I can’t wait. I spend the intervening weeks telling everyone I know and not getting Botox (which would mess up Hawkes’s measurements as it can also make the eyebrows heavier. All told, it’s more than five months since I last had Botox by the time of my operation).

Hawkes also signs me up for a consultation with a psychologist, Dr Kate le Maréchal, who specialises in providing support for people considering plastic surgery, working with people with everything from cleft palates to ... well, crepey upper eyes. Hawkes recommends the majority of her patients talk to le Maréchal; having spent 90 minutes on a Zoom call with her, I understand why.

“I’m not in the business of gatekeeping surgery,” le Maréchal tells me. “But it is useful to get patients to think about what they hope to achieve with their procedures.”

I tell her I want to look better in selfies, assuming she’ll laugh, but she says that is, in fact, precisely the kind of thing I should be hoping for. People who think their untreated facial feature is, for example, the one thing preventing them from finding true love, or getting promoted at work, or just being happy ... they’re the ones destined for surgical disappointment.

Le Maréchal checks that my partner is supportive (which he is; he’s concerned about how much it will hurt me but fine) and that my friends are equally supportive (they’re mainly desperate for me to do it first so that they can).

And then the day comes! I’m nervous, as I’ve said, though not horrifically, and then I’m there, then I’m sedated ...

And now?

I’m coming round. A nurse is holding an ice pack over my eyes, telling me it all went really well. After an hour of icing, the pack is removed. My eyes feel tight — swelling, you see — and I can’t blink easily, plus my eyesight itself is blurry, but I’m handed a mirror.

The blurring resolves, I am able to focus on my reflection for long enough to realise it isn’t too gruesome at all. My eyelids look like a couple of purple slugs, but that’s it ... And, hooray! It definitely doesn’t look weird.

I am helped off the bed and into a private recovery room. I feel a little wobbly but also triumphant. My eyes are stiff, sticky and weird feeling — smeary (I’ve learnt) because they’ve been treated with antibiotic drops — but I’m not in any pain.

I do a selfie. I survey the selfie. It’s very early days admittedly — but I begin to suspect that this is going to look absolutely brilliant.

Nurse One returns and gives me my aftercare programme, which is intense. Hawkes comes, tells me it has gone really well, and asks if I have any questions.

“Am I mad in already thinking it’s going to look absolutely brilliant?” I say.
“No. I think it will really suit you,” she says.

I knew it!

At 12.15 my partner arrives to chaperone me home.

That first week is both fine — and a lot. As Hawkes said, bleph is a relatively easy surgery, but it is still surgery. I’ve been discharged with co-codamol for the pain but I need nothing more than paracetamol for the first 24 hours, and nothing at all after that.

I must wear compression stockings for three days, use antibiotic gel on the stitches at night and apply the smeary antibiotic drops into the eyes themselves every four hours. I can’t touch the stitches (apart from when I apply the gel) and I can’t get them wet, which means I can’t wash my hair. I must sleep with my head raised at a 45-degree angle and I must surgical-tape plastic domed lenses over my eyes at night to ensure I don’t scratch them in my sleep.

Yet I’m semi-operational from the morning after. I take my dog for a walk with sunglasses over my (weirdly beautifully) stitched eyes. I do a full morning’s work from home, then start feeling icky in the afternoon and my cheeks dramatically flush. This is, apparently, a response to the anaesthesia. I chill and snooze, then feel fine again in an hour or two.

The week goes on. Hawkes had warned me that swelling and bruising can look more dramatic in the direct aftermath, but it doesn’t. It actually just looks a little better, less red, less swollen, every day. Hawkes gave me her phone number, told me to message with any issues, but there aren’t any, so I don’t.

I do tire quickly. The sticky stiffness of the stitches, the way they limit my capacity to blink, means my eyesight isn’t 100 per cent, which means I’m constantly straining to see, which is tiring. So is walking around with sunglasses on all the time.

“You could go Brazilian style?” a friend suggests.

Apparently, because cosmetic surgery is so common in Brazil, no one bothers hiding their faces after it, they just walk around battered, bruised and proud. In the meantime I am going around enjoyably, mysteriously swaddled in a Rise & Fall cashmere bandana and The Avantguard shades, fully invested in what I’ve taken to calling convalescence-core.

By the end of the first week my hair is filthy and the stitches itch horrifically, but I am even more convinced this is going to look absolutely brilliant, so: completely fine.

I return to Hawkes to have the stitches removed.

She congratulates me on how well I’m healing — I respond smugly — and then confirms my suspicions about how absolutely brilliant it’s looking.

My lids are still somewhat swollen and pink, the scars beneath the stitches are pinker yet and a little raised, though they fall along the line of the crease, so aren’t especially noticeable, and will fade to almost nothing over time. But generally my new-and-improved eye area just looks fresh. Sharp, not flabby or heavy or ruched. The way my brows sit, the way my face has opened up ... It’s just lovely.

Hawkes tells me I can ditch the intense aftercare regime of week one entirely, switch instead to a couple of products she has set me up with on the digital platform GetHarley — a silicone scar treatment gel and a post-op SPF powder — tells me I can wear make-up again in three days’ time, and sends me home to wash my hair (bliss).

I’m flying from this point. No longer itchy, no longer smeary, loving the results more every day.

I have an especially gorgeous moment when an Instagram ad for a shimmery eyeshadow pops up on my feed, and I think, “Pretty, but it would make my lids look more crepey ... but hang on, no! Not any more, it wouldn’t!” I buy the eyeshadow. It looks perfect.

People who know either give me rave reviews or say they can’t see any difference (testimony to how natural Hawkes’s work is). People who don’t know say things like:

“Have you had eyelash extensions?”
“Have you changed your hair?”

— i.e. “You look good but I can’t put my finger on why.”

I meet someone for the first time at a work thing; she looks at me and says:

“Haven’t you got beautiful eyes?”

Six weeks after the procedure, it’s sign-off time. I am so incredibly pleased. This work has exceeded even my highest expectations. It looks so natural, so subtle — and yet, my God, it is powerful. My face looks happier, brighter, lighter.

Far from exposing the unworked-upon aspects of my face relatively, the openness bleph has given me leaves all of me looking better. More balanced.

There’s a little healing still to go: some fading pinkness, some enduring numbness in the inner corner of the lids. But nothing that hurts, or makes me anxious, nothing another month or two won’t cure. Nothing to get in the way of just how ridiculously pleased I am with the overall result.

Blepharoplasty starts from £7,250
Dr Elizabeth Hawkes
120 Sloane Street, London SW1
34 Great Titchfield Street, London W1