Allison, 67, got a facelift that didn’t give her the results she wanted, including making it difficult to close one eye
She decided to go to Dr. Oren Tepper in N.Y.C. for a second facelift
Allison tells PEOPLE that she wanted to look her age and is now thrilled with her appearance
When Allison got plastic surgery years ago, things didn’t go as planned.
She tells PEOPLE she went the “cheapo” route, unfortunately, which led to “complications.” She was hoping to improve her facial appearance, but she left dissatisfied with the results.
“I left saying, ‘Never again. This is never happening again,'” she tells PEOPLE. “I had gotten a facelift and I couldn’t close my eye. I was told that at that point [the doctors I saw] had put Botox in and that was the reason. It took three months. I had an open eye, so I had to patch it, lubricate it, and it was possible that I couldn’t restore it.”
Allison, who is currently 67 and has spent years working as a nurse, didn’t want to be stuck with a botched plastic surgery job, so she turned to Dr. Oren Tepper, a trusted plastic surgeon who had been recommended to her by a friend. After going in for a consultation at Dr. Tepper’s New York City office, Allison said she “trusted him immediately.”
Dr. Oren Tepper
Allison before her plastic surgery
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Allison says she felt like she looked “80-85” before she went to Dr. Tepper for her facelift, but her goal was to simply look her age. She never wanted to look 20 or 30 years younger than she actually is.
“I wanted to look natural,” she says. “I’m not a movie star, I’m not a Kardashian. I have to have wrinkles. I have to look my age. My face had to match my body. I had to look right.”
Dr. Tepper says that in terms of Allison’s previous surgery, from a medical standpoint, he believes that she just needed another facelift because her results just weren’t quite enough. “She felt like she had taken a step into surgery and didn’t feel like she looked all that much better,” he says of her first facelift.
“She just needed it to be a little bit more aggressive with what we did for her, which was a facelift,” Dr. Tepper describes. “We did some resurfacing of her skin, so up around the mouth as well as the lower eyelid. And then what we did for her, which I think was the most powerful thing, was the addition of volume. I use her example — she’s such a nice example of the power of restoring volume in the face because she was so deflated. She just had such facial deflation and we see that a lot with significant weight loss, but that was not her issue. She didn’t have any other real underlying reasons to be so deficient in volume other than that was her anatomy. And that really contributed I think to her appearance. I don’t want to say advanced age, but she certainly looked older than she is. And I think the volume for her was the biggest thing we did to help her.”
To add volume, Dr. Tepper did a bit of fat grafting by taking fat from Allison’s thighs. He says this is better than artificial filler because it’s better for the body and the skin by using your own cells, and this way you don’t have to do it repetitively — in theory you just do it the one time.
The surgeon used his “boomerang lift” on Allison, which adds fat into the cheeks and under the eyes in a boomerang shape. He also added some fat to Allison’s temples. “You’re seeing all this bone and when you start to see the edges of bone, that can appear very atrophied and look really like someone’s a lot older than they are,” he explains, noting that he added some volume into her eyelids, which helped fix the issue with her eye.
Her four-hour surgery went off without a hitch, and her recovery did as well. Allison tells PEOPLE that she had the normal amount of swelling for the first few weeks, but she went back to her usual routine fairly quickly. Her swelling was gone within about two months, she says, and while she didn’t go out in New York right away, she wasn’t worried if she had.
“No one looks at you anyway,” she says with a laugh. “No one cares — you’re in New York.”
Dr. Oren Tepper
Allison after her plastic surgery
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Allison’s family was by her side in support throughout her whole plastic surgery journey, but she says she really did this for herself. Dr. Tepper even praises her husband for being so supportive and standing beside her for the whole process. He says he’s seen every kind of partner while doing this job — ranging in levels of support — and he says they essentially “went through the process together.”
“My husband would love me no matter what,” Allison says of her appearance. “But I did this for me because I was sad. Now I’ll age gracefully. I’m really satisfied with the whole amazing experience and I look my age.
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