Denise Richards has offered her most detailed account yet of the cosmetic procedures behind her 2025 facelift, explaining on a recent podcast appearance how a friend’s advice pushed her toward a far more comprehensive surgery than she originally planned.
Speaking on the 3 August episode of Bunnie Xo’s Dumb Blonde podcast, Richards, 55, recalled her initial hesitation.
“Originally I had been thinking about doing just my neck,” she said.
“Then a friend of mine, she’s very well-known, and she’s not public about hers, and she said to me, ‘You have to do the whole thing.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do the whole thing.’ I was scared.”
After researching further and consulting Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei, Richards ultimately opted for a full procedure, touching up “the neck, the lower face, the upper,” along with a brow lift and upper eyelid surgery.
She described her decision-making process with a home-renovation analogy, saying she didn’t want to end up with mismatched results the way “you remodel a house and do one room and the room looks great, but it doesn’t match the rest of the house.”
Talei, who performed the roughly four-and-a-half-hour surgery in June 2025, has previously detailed the specifics of the procedure himself, describing a “face and neck lift” combined with a “temporal brow restoration” and a “cupid corner lift” designed to lift the corners of the mouth.
He’s said Richards was “incredibly happy” with the results, telling him afterward, “I look like myself again,” and explaining that her motivation went beyond appearance alone.
“She felt like her face just didn’t look like her anymore. She’s got the energy of a 12-year-old, she felt like her look didn’t match the way she feels anymore.”
Richards, who first underwent breast augmentation at 19 and has previously said she’d largely avoided facial procedures beyond occasional Botox and filler, shared before-and-after photos of the facelift alongside Talei in March 2026, describing her goal at the time as wanting to “put things back up, where they were before.”
