How to Know You’re Done With Filler and Ready for a Facelift—According to a Beverly Hills Surgeon

Caroline Stanbury has done the fillers, tried the Botox, and even had her nose straightened with a syringe. But on Uncut & Uncensored, the Real Housewives of Dubai star admits there came a point when “that was never going to hold me up.” Her neck started to crinkle, her eyelids disappeared, and the corners of her mouth dragged down. 

In this episode, Beverly Hills, double board-certified surgeon Dr. Garo Kassabian explains how to spot the line between maintenance and surgery. He walks Stanbury through the moment when injectables stop helping and genetics, sun, stress, or illness take over. From overfilling that stretches the skin to surgeons who don’t understand facial anatomy, Kassabian lays out what actually makes someone a facelift candidate—and why he’d rather give you a younger version of yourself than a completely different face.

When to Get a Facelift, According to One Doctor

Signs filler isn’t cutting it anymore

There’s a point where no amount of clever injection technique can fake lift. It starts with the brow easing downward in a way Botox can’t disguise. Your eyelid space shrinks, and suddenly you can’t even get eyeshadow on. The corners of your mouth drift south, giving you the exact expression Stanbury bluntly calls “resting b*tch face.”

Then come the structural shifts: jowling that won’t stay snatched no matter how much jawline filler you add, hollowness under the eyes that makes you look permanently tired, and a neck that “starts to give away” with bands and creasing. Kassabian’s rule of thumb? If filler can no longer lift, and you’re just chasing the same areas over and over, you’re working against biology instead of with it. That’s when tweaking becomes patchwork, and a facelift becomes the option that actually resets everything instead of adding more weight to already tired tissue.

Feeling like you’re aging overnight? It’s not in your head

One of the most jarring parts of Kassabian’s explanation is that aging doesn’t happen on a slow, predictable schedule. He tells Stanbury that “in a matter of a few months, you can age 7 to 10 years’ worth.” It’s not dramatic lighting or a bad week, but a real physiological shift.

He says the trigger is usually one of three things: major stress, illness, or simple genetics flipping the switch earlier than expected. That’s why you sometimes see someone you haven’t run into in a year and think, “Whoa, what happened?” According to Kassabian, the face changes fast. Brows drop, fat pads under the eyes become more visible, cheeks deflate, jowls appear, and the neck bands tighten up all at once. That’s usually when Kassabian recommends considering surgery, since a facelift can reposition everything at once.

Choosing a facelift surgeon in a trend-obsessed world

With social media glamorizing every procedure and “experts” popping up overnight, picking the right surgeon is the most important decision you’ll make. That’s why Kassabian’s warning is blunt: “buyer beware.”

He says the biggest issue today is that everyone has a microphone. Dermatologists, eye doctors, and even providers with minimal surgical training are suddenly marketing themselves as facelift specialists. He stresses checking for board certification in plastic surgery, looking into where they trained, and confirming they’ve completed actual facelift fellowships—not a weekend course, not a trending technique they learned from Instagram.

Then, there’s the trend-chasing problem. Kassabian’s seeing patients with irreversible scars from aggressive lip lifts, botched thread lifts, and procedures that should never have been done on their anatomy. “Some areas are not to be touched,” he says, citing nerve injuries, hair loss, and thick scars from surgeons experimenting with new ideas on real faces.

Just do your research. Look at before-and-afters, talk to people who’ve gone to the doctor, ask who trained them, and make sure their work aligns with what you want—natural, lifted, and still you. 

To hear more insights from Stanbury and Dr. Kassabian’s conversation, listen to Uncut & Uncensored wherever you get your podcasts.

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