Welcome to your facelift

Open, honest, straightforward, and entertaining are not necessarily the words one generally associates with writing about cosmetic surgery, but they are exactly the qualities that make Helen Bransford's Welcome to Your Facelift unique. At the age of forty-seven and married to a man (writer Jay McInerney) seven years her junior, Helen decided it was time to recapture that face she no longer saw when looking in the mirror. Her surgery involved a "touch of lipo" under the. chin, a forehead peel, an upper eyelid tuck, dermabrasion under the eyes, and a standard lift, and she chronicles it all - with sage advice from the veteran to the uninitiated - from the moment the decision was made to that day, a month after the event, when she was "dead certain" she'd done the right thing. For those who don't know anyone who's been through cosmetic surgery (or who are willing to talk openly about it), Helen Bransford will be that best friend who tells. what it's really like and provides the invaluable guidance and suggestions that come only from experience. To augment her own story, Bransford has interviewed doctors, nurses, dermatologists, and other patients, adding their expertise and experiences to her own. She has researched every procedure from the most common eyelift to state-of-the-art ultrasonic liposuction, and she reports from the cosmetic surgery trenches with authority, understanding, and above all, the. awareness that "the entire exercise deals with the superficial, so you should consider no detail too trite."