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- Leslie, from Indiana, won a free preservation deep plane extended facelift from a social media ad posted by Dr. Mike Nayak in 2024
- She traveled to Turkey with her daughter to get the plastic surgery, which was performed as part of the TeoNayak Congress masterclass, in front of 500 medical students
- She experienced extreme bleeding during the surgery, which resulted in serious bruising
Leslie, a 52-year-old woman in Indiana, admits that she never wins anything.
That all changed last year when she came across a social media post on Nayak Plastic Surgery — the channels for plastic surgeon Dr. Mike Nayak, who is based in St. Louis, Mo., advertising that a model was needed.
“I had been following Dr. Nayak on Instagram for about three years before this,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “His work is phenomenal.”
The perk? Your plastic surgery would be free.
The catch? Your plastic surgery would be done live in front of 500 medical students.
The offer coincided with a time when Leslie says she felt like she’d started to notice a difference in her appearance when she looked in the mirror.
“You always start with the little things, right? The creams, then the Botox and the micro-needling,” she says. “I just looked tired. I noticed sagging and drooping. I thought, maybe one day I could do a facelift.”
Leslie mulled the opportunity and came to the conclusion: Go for it.
She submitted photos and went through two rounds of interviews before she was selected from hundreds of applicants. Eventually, Leslie got the call that she had just won a custom plastic surgery procedure and would be the live model as part of Dr. Nayak’s TeoNayak Congress.
While some people may have been put off by the fact that this surgery would be performed live in front of 500 medical students, Leslie says that part really appealed to her, because she also works in the medical field in a “busy OR.”
“Working in the OR myself and seeing medical students trickle through, I loved the idea that I could help in some way,” she says.
Dr. Nayak — who typically operates out of his St. Louis practice — held the TeoNayak Congress masterclass alongside his plastic surgery colleague Dr. Teoman Doğan in Turkey. Students came from all over the world for the three-day seminar.
Leslie’s surgery was part of Dr. Nayak’s live demonstration. He wore a camera (and had more cameras in his operating room) broadcasting the six-hour surgery into an auditorium where the students were watching live. He and his team were also narrating the procedures and answering questions from students in real time as he operated on Leslie.
For her surgery demonstration, she received a preservation deep plane extended facelift, brow lift, lower face neck lift, lower blepharoplasty to remove the puffiness under her eyes, fat transfer to fill out hollows under the eyes, a chemical peel for the skin under the eyes and a bit of lip filler, the surgeon shares.
“I did a brow lift for her because [her expression] looked sad,” he says, adding that the procedure could also be considered if people “look mad when they’re not mad.”
“I removed the fat bags from behind her eyelids. We used fat from her belly to build the dark circles out, to build the tear trough hollows out,” he says of the darkness surrounding her eyes. “And then I usually laser the overlying skin of the lower lids to treat wrinkles, but they didn’t have a laser that I liked, so I did it with a trichloroacetic acid peel instead.”
Leslie’s surgery wasn’t without complications. Unfortunately, she was an extreme bleeder, which required a modified suturing process and meant that Leslie suffered more bruising than the average patient. Even with the setback, she healed normally.
Dr. Nayak typically tells his patients that they aren’t ready to face the public for two to three weeks after their surgery, but Leslie says she had work to get back to work, and she felt ready to dive back in — she just had to go back to the OR a bit swollen and bruised at first. A full recovery takes months, though it varies from patient to patient. Three months into the healing process, Dr. Nayak says patients tend to be presentable enough to see the full result, but it could be six months to a year before patients report that all of their swelling has disappeared and they really feel like their surgery has “settled.”
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Leslie and her daughter stayed in Turkey for nine days in September 2024, then they returned home to Indiana. A few days after that, she was back at work in the OR.
The feedback from her friends and family (and everyone else in her life) after the swelling had gone down (a few months post-op) was so positive that it made her first contest win even sweeter.
“Everybody just says I look refreshed,” she says with a laugh. “‘You don’t look tired, you look refreshed,’ but I still look like me. That’s what I wanted to make sure of — I would still look like me. I wasn’t really trying to look younger.”
She says now the youthful feeling she has on the inside matches her outer appearance, which is often Dr. Nayak’s primary goal with his plastic surgeries. Leslie admits that she didn’t want to tell people she was getting the surgery done, because she feared judgment as there is still so much of a stigma around cosmetic procedures.
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“For some people, if you have plastic surgery, people think that you’re vain and you’re just all about looks,” she says. “That’s not the case. Sometimes when we look at ourselves, we’re like, ‘Do I really look that tired?’ Because I still feel really young inside. Not that 52 is old, old, but I just felt like I was aging on the outside quicker than I was on the inside.”
Though Leslie’s surgery was free, those interested in similar procedures with Dr. Nayak can find his pricing on his website. Currently, deep plane extended face lifts (which include a deep necklift) start at $150,000. Deep necklifts are $70,000, and brow lifts are $30,000 to $40,000. Prices vary on all of the procedures based on case complexity. Surgeries are currently being scheduled about one year out, once interested patients have had a consultation with the team.
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