Margot, 58, saw Dr. Mike Nayak at Nayak Plastic Surgery for a deep plane extended preservation facelift, deep neck lift, brow lift, upper and lower blepharoplasty, and full face CO2 laser resurfacingMargot tells PEOPLE that she had no plans for plastic surgery until she found Dr. Nayak on InstagramAfter Dr. Nayak shared Margot’s surgery results on Instagram, his commenters thought the after pictures were a different person
When Margot started following plastic surgeon Dr. Mike Nayak on Instagram, she had no plans for a facelift — or the eventual neck lift, brow lift, upper and lower blepharoplasty and CO2 laser resurfacing that was in her near future.
She simply stumbled on his Instagram and stayed because she was drawn in by the powerful before-and-after transformations. Those were what helped her make the decision to move forward with contacting Dr. Nayak for the facelift consultation — because she decided it was “Dr. Nayak or nobody” for such a big plastic surgery procedure.
“It was the combination of really great results and just his total transparency,” she says of what initially drew her to him and his practice after following his Instagram.
Margot before and after her plastic surgery.
Nayak Plastic Surgery
So she booked the consultation, met with the team and scheduled her appointment for a year out. For Margot, the decision was easy and was a total no-brainer.
“I’m spontaneous,” she admits. “I didn’t have (any other doctors) on my list, and I was confident (in his work), and it was easy.”
In the year between her consultation and her appointment, she grew more confident in her decision to take the plunge in getting a facelift, because she said her skin began to droop with age.
“Everything really sagged a lot in that year, because I was 58,” she says. “I was so ready once my appointment came around.”
Margot, who is based in Kentucky, traveled to Dr. Nayak’s practice, Nayak Plastic Surgeryin St. Louis, Mo., in August 2024 where she met the surgeon officially for the first time. He tells PEOPLE that her procedure was a “top-to-bottom balanced restoration,” which is very common among his patients. He performed a deep plane extended preservation facelift, deep neck lift, brow lift, upper and lower blepharoplasty and full face CO2 laser resurfacing.
“The whole face ages at once, so I did her brow, I did her upper and lower eyelids and a little bit of fat transfer into the middle section of the face,” he says, adding that he also performed a lower face and neck lift, as well as CO2 laser resurfacing on her whole face, which is why she has some redness in some of her “after” photos. Margot tells PEOPLE, though, that she also has rosacea, which can flare up with the laser treatment, hence the extra redness after the procedure.
As is the case with some procedures, Margot had a bit of a hiccup with hers, Dr. Nayak shares.
“She had a little nerve damage at the beginning. Her left lower lip was a little bit weak. That was featured in the videos (on Instagram), and we talked all about it. We talked about why it happens, the time that it typically recovers. By six weeks, it was all gone.”
Margot before and after her plastic surgery.
Nayak Plastic Surgery
During her recovery, of which she spent the first 10 days in St. Louis at the clinic, Margot documented everything with Dr. Nayak and his team for social media. She told him from the beginning she would be very open with her whole treatment, and she stuck with that.
He says that during her healing process, Margot was “the subject of a lot of controversies” as her videos started to post on his social media, because of her transformation.
“She had millions of views, and hundred of comments,” he says, noting that so many people were writing, “That’s not the same person. The ears are different. The ‘this’ is different.”
He says that while she was healing, her earlobes had swollen, which made them appear different, convincing people that it was not the same person as in the “before” photos. However, once her swelling went down, the shape of her earlobes bounced back to normal.
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Margot before and after her plastic surgery.
Nayak Plastic Surgery
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It took the requisite two to three weeks for Margot to heal to a presentable condition, as with most of Dr. Nayak’s patients, and two to three months before she could really see the full result. Now at eight months post-op, her face has basically settled, and Margot feels great about her “spontaneous” decision. But funny enough, she works in an environment where most people don’t notice. As a commercial pilot, she doesn’t see most of her colleagues on a regular basis, so she says most people haven’t really noticed a change in her appearance. Those who have noticed a difference, she’s had the urge a few times to blurt out that she’s gotten a facelift, because she says she’s simply too honest to say anything else.
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“I think that I am a little bit different than most people,” she says of how she feels about the whole journey and the results. “Internally, I was always walking around thinking I was still 35. My body feels in good shape, so it’s almost like I just feel like myself again. You get to a point where you start looking in the mirror and you don’t feel like yourself. So when Dr. Nayak takes a few years off of you, it’s like, OK, yeah, I feel like myself again.”
But one thing Margot wants to make clear in all of this, is that she never lacked confidence, even before her facelift. She says just because she decided to overhaul her appearance, it didn’t mean she wasn’t a secure person looking to “change my life” if she “looked better.”
She simply wanted a facelift so that her outside appearance matched how she felt on the inside.
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