Caroline Stanbury was looking at before-and-after photos of women who had facelifts when she noticed something.
“You get handed books [with pictures of] 80-year-old women that suddenly look 70 or 60. And that’s not me. I couldn’t relate to them,” the Real Housewives of Dubai star spoke out.
“I wanted to find someone else my age,” she explained, “who had done it but she wasn’t looking dreadful. She just wanted to look better, right?”
Caroline Stanbury and husband Sergio Carallo.
Caroline Stanbury/Instagram
That’s why Stanbury decided to document her facelift, which she had last November.
Stanbury tells PEOPLE she’d noticed that filler and Botox — which she said she began getting at age 26 — weren’t achieving her desired look, explaining, “I had one crazy eyebrow. My lips had gone a bit weird. My face just [got] rounder and rounder and bigger and bigger, because I just kept pumping filler in my jawline.”
She had her filler dissolved, and ”thought to myself the cost of doing this every year, you know, is a facelift.”
Once her friend, podcast host Catt Sadlerhad a facelift and —”looks unbelievable. She looks just refreshed” — Stanbury knew she would get one as well.
But she didn’t need any convincing to share the procedure with the world.
“I have a podcast which is called Uncut and Uncensored. So, if I then censor my life, what’s the point?” Stanbury says. “Also, I’m on a reality TV show. This is my reality.”
But beyond that, she says she felt a responsibility to women her age.
“I have a very young husband,” she said of Sergio Carrallo, 29, adding “not that he wanted me to do it, but these are things that women go through.”
“I don’t want women to see me and think at 48, I look like this and they look like s—t. It’s an unnatural thing.”
Sergio Carrallo and Caroline Stanbury pose 16 days after her facelift.
Sergio Carrallo/Instagram
The founder of the Bust the Labelsupplement line shared that she had a deep plane facelift and had excess eyelid skin removed. She didn’t, however, get her eyes lifted, which she says made a “massive difference” — and relies on Botox for her forehead instead.
“People’s necks go. You can’t suddenly have this baby-smooth, soft skin and think that this is natural. You’re telling people that skin looks like this and theirs doesn’t. That something’s wrong with them, which doesn’t make any sense.”
“It’s rubbish,” she says. “That’s not what skin looks like in your forties unless you’ve been yanked within an inch of your life by a very clever surgeon.”
Fans have praised Stanbury for her honesty and candor — and, she says, they always ask her the same question.
Caroline Stanbury shares her facelift scars.
Sergio Carallo
“Everybody wants to know how the scars are,” she said — sharing that these days, they’re doing just fine.
“The one behind your ear is the longest to heal, but [now] it’s just a little red light mark that can be covered with makeup,” she says, adding, “the body heals in an incredible way.”
