I Spent $5K on Facelift Consults

What 13 consults with top surgeons taught me

Over the last two years, I’ve probably spent close to $5,000 on facelift consults before finally pulling the trigger three months ago and having surgery myself. Yes, it sounds excessive. And after doing a handful of interviews with beauty editors recently, I realized maybe it actually is. Every single one of them said some version of: “Wow. I’ve never met anyone who has done this many consults.”

I wear that badge proudly.

Could I have used the $5K on more treatments instead? Sure. But instead, I spent it working up enough courage to go under the knife and making sure I was making the right decision. And honestly? I learned a lot.

Is it moderately borderline psychopathic? Maybe.

I am an obsessive researcher by nature. On everything. Maybe that comes from my former life as a top-ranked Wall Street analyst at JPMorgan, where my entire job was essentially deep research and trying to avoid very, very expensive mistakes on the order of tens of millions everyday. Or maybe it came from the sheer anxiety of making a permanent decision about my face. Likely both.

Either way, I went D-E-E-P.

And judging by the volume of emails, DMs, and group chats, many of you are in deep as well. What started as me casually sharing my own experience somehow turned into a full-blown facelift thread. Many women I know are facelift-curious and overwhelmed. They don’t know how to choose a surgeon. They don’t know what questions to ask. And perhaps most importantly, they don’t know how much of what they are seeing online is real. In my humble opinion, so much of it is sugar coated and wildly misleading.

So, after an almost absurd number of consults, countless hours of research, and now having actually gone through the surgery and recovery myself, I wanted to start packaging some of this information together in a more useful way.

After seeing 11 surgeons in person, plus two international consults, the biggest takeaway is this: there are a lot of great doctors at all price points, and many have completely different opinions. You could meet ten “top” surgeons and get many different recommendations, plans, and vibes. The challenge isn’t just finding a good doctor. It’s finding the one who understands your goals, your psychology, your tolerance for the process, all within the budget that you think is appropriate to spend.

Choosing someone to operate on your face is terrifying as is paying the bill in full. Ouch. The price of a facelift seems to be going up rapidly. Some of the doctors I consulted with only 6 months ago are now double in price. All that said, I could not be happier to be on the other side of it. It’s one of the best decisions I’ve made.

There is so, so much information I want to share from these consults that it simply doesn’t fit cleanly into Substack articles. And more importantly, a lot of what I learned isn’t really written anywhere. I went into the dark depths of Instagram and YouTube, and I genuinely feel like I have a different perspective and value add than what is currently out there.

I am hoping to package up this information in a useful way. For my inaugural guide, I teamed up with my girlfriend Emily Wagner of GroomedLA was also having one. Literally the same week.

She’s also a-New Yorker that relocated to Los Angeles, which is probably why we get along. We chose two completely different surgeons, and we are both ecstatic with our results. We also chose very different recovery paths. I went full rest-and-Valium mode. Emily went full hyperbaric chamber and every recovery extra imaginable. I’m 48 and Emily is 60. She also felt like she had too much information not to share.

Because both of us were getting bombarded with questions, we decided to move forward with this collaborative content initiative aptly called The Girlfriend Guides, co-authored by both of us and includes everything we learned from the consult process.

These are practical, no bullshit, fully transparent guides designed to save you time, money, stress, and hopefully a few emotional spirals. If you like them, more to come…

These are not medical guides. And they are definitely not “best doctors” lists. They are practical guides about choosing a doctor, navigating consults, managing expectations, and understanding the emotional and psychological side of all of this.

So if you do purchase a guide, let me know what you think! Now, because so many of you have asked, here is the full list of surgeons I consulted with. You already know about Dr. Ben Talei and Dr. Steven Levine, and that I ultimately chose Dr. Mark Murphy to perform my surgery. Below is the full rundown. All excellent doctors at the top of their game. And if you have questions, leave them in the comments, DM me, or email me.

The Consults

I started with