I suddenly aged overnight when I hit 60 so I took the plunge with a facelift – now I look and feel 10 years younger: Fashion designer KAREN MILLEN reveals the details of EXACTLY what she had done to turn back the clock

Her name is synonymous with fashion: Karen Millen, the High Street designer whose dresses have been worn by some of the world’s most famous women, including the Princess of Wales.

But, as 63-year-old Karen confesses in this exclusive interview, even she isn’t immune to concerns about her appearance.

Three years ago, she looked in the mirror and realized her once sharp jawline was gone.

‘I had suddenly grown older overnight. I had just turned 60 and it was almost as if I woke up one morning and the texture of my skin was gone,” Karen recalls.

‘Everything started to look really creepy: my hands, neck and even my legs. What particularly bothered me was the jawline area on my face, which tends to shrink a lot as we age. It became quite noticeable.”

Such a dramatic physical change has put a major dent in her self-confidence.

“I think people have certain expectations of ‘Karen Millen’, of what she’s going to wear or what she’s going to look like,” she tells me.

‘It was difficult for me to physically process what had happened to me because it happened quite suddenly. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that I thought, ‘This is it, it’s all downhill now’.”

Indeed, she refused: this summer Karen took the plunge with a £35,000 facelift using the latest surgical techniques.

Was it worth it? The Mail followed Karen before, during and after her procedure in July and documented her transformation. As these photos show, not only have her hated jowls been eradicated, but many of her fine lines have also been smoothed out.

“Knowing I look ten years younger makes me feel ten years younger, if not more,” she says.

You might wonder why something so superficial is so important to her. After all, she has always been the picture of a strong, confident businesswoman – even when it all went wrong.

Millen grew up on a council estate in Maidstone, Kent, and in 1981, aged just 19, started a small shirt-making business with her now ex-partner Kevin Stanford, funded by a £100 loan. When she sold the company in 2004 – for £95 million, of which she received £35 million – it grew into a global brand, with 400 stores in 65 countries.

But in 2017, after a dispute with HMRC over a £6 million tax bill – and after receiving catastrophically bad financial advice – she was declared bankrupt.

The much-loved Karen Millen brand can now be found online and is owned by fashion group Boohoo, who acquired it in 2019.

Women’s desire to look good, she says, comes not from vanity but from self-respect. ‘In the past you ended up on the shelf at a certain age, but now [older women are] very celebrated. So there’s more pressure on us to actually take care of ourselves – and that’s good. It keeps us on our toes, [so we don’t] become too complacent.”

Now that she’s rebuilt her design career – today she’s working with her old company on a capsule range called Karen Millen: The Founder – she estimates she’s spent many thousands of pounds on facial ‘touch-ups’ over the years, including Botox to prevent wrinkles; a laser skin resurfacing treatment called Fraxel; and Profhilo, an injectable treatment that aims to rebuild the skin of the face and body when it loses elasticity and firmness.

Ultimately, however, she concluded that a facelift would be “more cost-effective.” ‘You look at your face every day. Why don’t we fix it?’ she says.

That’s not to say she didn’t feel nervous before her operation at the Cadogan Clinic in Chelsea, west London.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is, whether it’s for health reasons or cosmetic reasons, there is a degree of risk and uncertainty associated with surgery.’

Karen’s surgeon, Dr Tunc Tiryaki, co-founder of the London Regenerative Institute, based at the luxury hotel and spa Corinthia, is known to clients as the ‘Da Vinci of facelifts’.

He is known for his pioneering work in ‘facial regeneration’ and was one of the first surgeons in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in mini-facelift procedures.

As Dr Tiryaki puts it, his approach not only makes you look younger, but also helps tackle ‘age-related decline’ at its source.

After a consultation, Karen opted for a surgical lift of the lower half of her face and neck, an eyelid surgery and a stem cell-enriched fat transfer, which involved taking fat from her thighs and transferring it to her face. It is little known that you can harvest stem cells from fat tissue: Dr. Tiryaki uses the fat to plump the face and the stem cells to regenerate aging facial skin and declining bone structure.

“Stem cells can turn into any cell in the body you need,” he tells me. ‘So when you inject your stem cells [around] your liver, these can turn into liver cells. If you inject them around the bone, they can promote bone growth. If you inject them into the skin, they help the skin.’

Karen had “heavy sun damage,” Dr. Tiryaki continues, and what he describes as the “three hallmarks of aging” on her face. ‘Bone resorption’, where the bones literally recede and ‘the framework scaffolding’ of the face loses ‘its definition and strength’; ‘skin muscle relaxation’, that’s what it sounds like and causes the skin to loosen; and ‘surface quality loss’, which occurs as we age and skin simply ages. The procedure was intended to address all three problems.

It’s not for the faint of heart. The operation took two and a half hours and Dr Tiryaki said healing would take six weeks, with full results visible about three months later.

“At first I found it difficult to open my mouth and eat, and I couldn’t talk for a week,” says Karen.

‘[But] day by day the bruising decreased, the swelling went down and even the scars healed. I was actually surprised at how easy the procedure was.

‘After two weeks I started going to meetings again, albeit still a little swollen, but not to the extent that people noticed.

‘After a month I was already receiving compliments on how good I looked.

‘I didn’t feel any real pain, just a little discomfort for a short while. It is remarkable how quickly our bodies are able to heal.’

Karen’s post-op plan also included a five-session hyperbaric chamber course with oxygen at the London Regenerative Institute, which cost £600.

These treatments, recommended by Dr. Tiryaki, involve sitting in a closed pressure chamber for an hour a day to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood. “It shortens healing time and also improves wound healing,” he explains.

Karen says her two sons – Josh, now 34, and Jake, 27 – were unfazed by what she had done and Josh has since acknowledged how good his mother looks. Meanwhile, her daughter Jordan, a 32-year-old yoga and pilates teacher, supported her every step of the way.

‘She was behind me 100 percent. She’s the one who always says, “Mommy should have it.”

But to this day, Karen’s 86-year-old mother, Sheila, knows nothing about her daughter’s surgery.

“I didn’t want to tell her at the time because I didn’t want her to worry,” she says.

Now she can anticipate Sheila’s reaction: “She’ll say, ‘What did you do that for?’ I don’t think she’s ever had a facial in her life, or even a pedicure or a manicure,” says Karen.

‘It was never important to her because I think women of that generation were too busy juggling everything.

‘She valued caring for others and caring for her family and always came second – or last.

‘I remember looking at my grandmother at the age of 70 and thinking she was an old lady with blue rinses and old-fashioned clothes. There’s no reason why we have to be like this now.”

Today, three months after her surgery, Karen couldn’t look any less “old lady.” Her complexion is dewy and her loose, sagging skin has been replaced by an impressively sculpted jawline. “I feel rejuvenated,” she says. ‘I would get up in the morning and look in the mirror, and I always looked quite tired and old.

‘Now I can actually see my eyes – they’re much clearer, they’re more open. My face is just fresher and with a little tinted moisturizer I’m good to go.

“In the past, I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed opening the front door.”

All this meant that she could properly celebrate her 63rd birthday last month. “It’s hard to put an age on what I look like,” she muses. ‘What is 63? How does 63 feel?

“Funnily enough, I was sitting next to a lady the other day and she said, ‘God, your skin is so smooth.’ What are you using?’ So it’s noticeably different and noticeably better.

“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to rejuvenate myself, and I don’t just mean physically, but how I feel inside. I feel like it gives me new energy.’ Karen also does not rule out that more operations will take place in the future.

‘Never say never. Hopefully by the time I’m in my early seventies I’ll look like someone in my sixties…

“Maybe I’ll get to a point where I’m happy being the way I am, but who knows?

‘They say surgery can be addictive. I completely understand that, because if you see an improvement somewhere, why wouldn’t you try it elsewhere?’ Will her new face help her new career?

“If you look good, you feel good, and if you feel good, you will perform better in everything you do, especially when you are in the public eye.

‘When we started the label, it was never about age, it was always about attitude.

‘For the first time in years I feel excited again. I feel alive. I feel like it’s my time again.’