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 Karen, 63, confesses in this exclusive interview, not even she is immune to concerns about her appearance.
Three years ago, he looked in the mirror and realized his once-sharp jaw was gone.
‘Suddenly he had aged 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 very creepy: my hands, my neck and even my legs. What bothered me the most was the double chin area of the face, which, as we age, tends to decrease a lot. It became quite noticeable.”
High Street designer Karen Millen, 63, photographed before and after her facelift operation which had been carried out at the Cadogan Clinic in Chelsea, west London.
Such a dramatic physical change took a toll on her self-confidence.
“I think there are certain expectations that people have of ‘Karen Millen,’ of what she’s going to wear or what she’s going to look like,” he tells me.
‘It was difficult for me to process what had happened to me physically because it was quite sudden. It was difficult to accept the fact that I felt: ‘This is it, everything is going downhill now.’
In fact, 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, documenting her transformation. As these photos reveal, not only have her hated double chins been eradicated, but many of her fine lines have also been softened.
“Knowing that I look ten years younger, I also feel ten years younger, if not more,” he says.
You may wonder why something so superficial matters so much to him. After all, she has always been the image of a strong and confident businesswoman, even when everything went wrong.
Millen grew up on a council estate in Maidstone, Kent, and in 1981, aged just 19, he started a small shirt-making business financed by a £100 loan, with his now former partner Kevin Stanford. After he sold the business in 2004 (for £95 million, of which he received £35 million), it skyrocketed to become a global brand, with 400 stores in 65 countries.
However, 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, arises not from vanity but from self-respect. ‘In the past, you reached a certain age and were left on the shelf, but now (older women are) very celebrated. So we have more pressure to take care of ourselves, and that’s a good thing. It keeps us on our toes, (so that we don’t) become too complacent.’
Having rebuilt her design career (today she is collaborating with her former company on a capsule range called Karen Millen: The Founder), she estimates she has spent many thousands of pounds over the years on facial “touch-ups”, including Botox to eliminate wrinkles; a laser skin resurfacing treatment called Fraxel; and Profhilo, an injectable treatment that aims to rebuild facial and body skin when it loses elasticity and firmness.
However, he eventually concluded that a facelift would be “more cost-effective.” ‘You look at your face every day. Why not 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.
“No matter what it is, whether it is for health or cosmetic reasons, surgery carries some risk and uncertainty.”
Karen took the plunge with a £35,000 facelift using the latest surgical techniques
Karen’s surgeon, Dr Tunc Tiryaki, co-founder of the London Regenerative Institute based at the luxury Corinthia hotel and spa, is known among clients as the “Da Vinci of facelifts”.
Recognized for his groundbreaking work in “facial regeneration,” he was one of the first surgeons in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in mini facelift procedures.
As Dr. Tiryaki says, his approach not only makes one look younger, but also helps address “age-related decline” at its source.
After a consultation, Karen opted for a surgical face lift to the lower half of her face and neck, an eyelid lift and a stem cell enriched fat transfer, taking fat from her thighs and transferring it to her face. It is little known that stem cells can be harvested from adipose 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 are capable of becoming any cell in the body that we need,” he tells me. ‘So if you inject stem cells (around) your liver, they can become liver cells. If you inject them around the bone, they can help bone growth. “If you inject them into the skin, they will help.”
Karen suffered “severe sun damage,” Dr. Tiryaki continues, and what he describes as the “three hallmarks of aging” on her face. “bone resorption,” in which the bones literally recede and the “structural structure” of the face loses “its definition and strength”; ‘sagging skin muscles’, which is what it looks like and causes the skin to become loose; and “loss of surface quality,” which occurs as we age and the skin simply ages. The procedure aimed to address all three problems.
It’s not for the faint-hearted. The operation took two and a half hours and Dr. Tiryaki reported that healing would take six weeks and full results would be visible about three months later.
“At first I found it difficult to open my mouth and eat, and I couldn’t speak for a week,” says Karen.
‘(But) every day the bruises decreased, the swelling decreased and even the scars healed. In fact, I was surprised at how easy the procedure was.
‘After two weeks, I was back at meetings, still a little swollen, but not enough for people to notice.
‘After a month, I was already receiving compliments on how good I looked.
‘I didn’t feel any real pain, more of a slight discomfort for a short period of time. It’s amazing how quickly our bodies are able to heal.’
Karen’s surgeon, Dr. Tunc Tiryaki, was one of the first surgeons in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in mini facelift procedures.
Karen’s post-op plan also included a five-session course using a hyperbaric oxygen chamber at the London Regenerative Institute, which cost £600.
Recommended by Dr. Tiryaki, these treatments involve sitting in a closed pressure chamber for an hour a day to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood. “It decreases 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 100 percent behind me. She’s the one who always says, “Mom owns it.”
But to this day, Karen’s 86-year-old mother, Sheila, knows nothing about her daughter’s operation.
“I didn’t want to tell him at the time because I didn’t want him to worry,” she says.
Now you can anticipate Sheila’s response: “She’ll say, ‘Why did you do that?’ I don’t think she’s ever had a facial, or even a pedicure or manicure, in her life,” says Karen.
“It’s never been important to her because I think women of that generation were too busy juggling everything.
‘She placed importance on caring for others and family and always came second or last.
‘I remember looking at my grandmother at 70, thinking she was an old lady with blue rinses and out-of-fashion clothes. There’s no reason we have to be like this now.’
Today, three months after her surgery, Karen couldn’t look any less “old.” His complexion is dewy and his loose, sagging skin has been replaced by an impressively sculpted jawline. “I feel rejuvenated,” she says. ‘I used to get up in the morning and look in the mirror, and I always looked quite tired and aged.
‘Now I can see my eyes: they are much clearer, more open. My face is fresher and with just a little bit of tinted moisturizer, I’m ready to go.
“Before I probably wouldn’t have liked to open the front door very much.”
All of which meant he was able to properly celebrate his 63rd birthday last month. “It’s hard to put an age on my appearance,” he reflects. ‘What is 63? How does 63 feel?
‘Funnily enough, the other day I was sitting next to a lady and she said to me: ‘God, your skin is so soft.’ What do you use? So, it’s noticeably different and noticeably better.
‘I’m grateful to have the opportunity to rejuvenate myself, and I mean not just physically, but also how I feel inside. I feel like it’s given me new energy.” Karen also doesn’t rule out more surgery in the future.
‘Never say never. By the time I’m in my early 70s, I hope to look like someone in their 60s…
‘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 totally get it because if you’ve seen an improvement somewhere, why not try it somewhere else?’ Will his new face help restart his career?
“If you look good, it makes you feel good, and if you feel good, then you will perform better in whatever you do, especially if 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.”
