Denise Richards Shares Jaw-Dropping Before and After Facelift Transformation Photos

Denise Richards is celebrating the “best thing” she’s done for herself as she shows off the dramatic results of her facelift.

The Wild Things star, 55, shared a before-and-after look at the results of her plastic surgery in a joint Instagram post with surgeon, Dr. Ben Talei on Saturday, revealing that she also underwent a temporal brow lift, upper blepharoplasty, lip lift for the outer corners of her mouth and fat grafting. (See the photos here.)

In an Instagram Story post, Richards called the surgery “the best thing I could’ve done for myself,” confessing in an interview with Allure that she was “terrified” to go under the knife about eight months ago.

“I wanted to put things back up, where they were before,” Richards, who had previously only undergone cosmetic surgery in relation to her breast implants, told the outlet. “I was terrified,” she continued. “Being in the public eye since my 20s, people know what I look like—a facelift is not something that I could hide.”

“I’m one who says ‘never say never,’ but I always said I would never get a facelift, because that’s my face. This is how I make my money,” she continued. “I’ve been in this business a long time. People know what I look like. I’ve never done anything aesthetically to my face. This is my nose. I’ve done a little Botox. I’ve done very little filler—it made me look like I was heavy; it just did not work for my face. I’ve never touched anything [on my face] like that.”

While she was “scared” of a facelift at first, Richards said she started to notice sagging in her neck. “I had tried that [lifting] tape—a makeup artist showed it to me—and I’m like, ‘Well, if that’s where I want it to go, why not just put it back there?’” she recalled. “It was something that I’d been thinking about for two years, going back and forth, and the last six months [before my surgery], I was like, ‘I have to do this.’”

In Saturday’s Instagram post, Richards’ surgeon referred to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum as “one of the most lovely and beautiful people to ever walk this earth.”

“It was an incredible pleasure and honor to be trusted with her restoration and more importantly, the preservation of her character and beauty,” Talei continued. “It’s hard to describe in a paragraph the type of surgery or procedures I do because they are so unique in many ways and there isn’t really a standard to compare it to.”

After detailing the procedures in greater detail, Talei concluded, “I’m so grateful to Denise for being so open about the procedure. She’s been through so much this past year and her resilience is just astounding. She has a golden heart and her golden face is hers again.”