People noticed something weird about her face. This is what’s happening.

As someone who grew up worried about Lindsay Lohan—I was a teen when she was in and out of rehab and probation—it’s been heartwarming to witness her comeback. She’s killing it in her new holiday rom-com niche; she’s mom to a baby boy; in interviews, she seems happy and healthy. And then there’s her new face, which looks kind of like her old face—and which the internet has been both gushing over and, of course, speculating on how it came to be.

Plastic surgeons have publicly hypothesized that to look younger and mysteriously glowy, she’s had everything from a face-lift to a lip lift to a nose job. One viral video suggested that the procedures could have cost as much as $300,000. Lohan has admitted only to doing Morpheus8 (a microneedling procedure), light therapy, and other laser treatments, while some insider sources point to her lifestyle changes: clean eating, Pilates. Well, which is it?

I reached out to Anil Shah, a double-board-certified facial plastic surgeon who works in Chicago and New York, to better understand how Lindsay Lohan’s new look fits in with today’s plastic surgery trends. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Before I ask for your take, can you shed some light on why surgeons can have such wildly different explanations for her transformation?

We’re in an age where we have filters and makeup and lighting, and so that makes the guessing game a little bit difficult. And then, everyone always looks so different in so many different poses. I mean, you might see someone going to an event, and you might only get a three-quarter or a profile, but then the next time you see them, the lighting is different and everything’s different. Then, coupling that with so many people are gaining weight and losing weight, and all of us are changing as we get older and younger, and so all that makes it so complicated. But it also makes it fun. Because when you see someone who looks fantastic, you’re like, Whatever that person did, I want to do that. And that’s what’s exciting.

So the Lindsay buzz is good for business, then?

This is great for business. It’s great for the patient and great for plastic surgeons.

Time for your two cents. What do you think is behind Lindsay’s new face?

That’s the mystery question. I don’t think she got her nose done. If you look at what is being done now in plastic surgery, maybe we get some answers. Ten years ago, the only answers we had were basically fillers and a full face-lift. Now there’s a lot of tools that surgeons, myself included, use. And one of those is the “baby face-lift.”

When you do a face-lift, you release everything and reposition the heaviness back to where it was, back up into the cheekbones. As Lindsay was getting older, she had fullness along the lower part of her face. You could see it on her smile lines—there was some heaviness there. And now when you look at her, all that fullness that was lower is now kind of repositioned. Her cheekbones look great again.

With a baby face-lift, what you’re doing is a traditional face-lift through a much smaller incision. A traditional face-lift is about 26 centimeters of scar. And in a baby face-lift, you can have, depending where you make your scars, as little as 2 centimeters. So you’re avoiding having the biggest stigmata of plastic surgery, which is having visible scars. If you can avoid that scar, then you can have a secret that no one will ever really know.

Speaking of fullness, is it possible she had fillers and got them dissolved?

That’s right on trend. Because before you get a face-lift, the recommendation—which I recommend to my patients as well, depending on where their fillers are—is basically dissolve your fillers. Because we’re changing the shape of your face.

Her father entered the conversation to say that she hasn’t had any surgery, only “peels, fillers, and Botox.” Do you see any world in which that could be the case?

The reason it seems less likely is just how her facial shape has changed so dramatically. I think that there’s definitely a possibility that she didn’t have that done. But if I were her hairdresser, I know where I would look for the scar.

Is there any way she’s getting this look just through skin care?

I think of skin care almost as maintenance, not as rejuvenation. Sometimes people get those confused, because they’ll look at someone endorsing a product and think, Hey, if I use this particular cream, then I’m going to look like the celebrity using it. And in reality, oftentimes that person has done other things and they’re using this cream to maintain themselves, not to restore themselves. Many skin care products are awesome, but they aren’t as effective as reversing things. They’re great at maintaining things.

Think of aging as this hill we’re on top of, and as we age, we’re going down the hill. Doing those types of things puts the brakes on aging, but they don’t actually raise you to a higher spot on the hill.

But would a procedure like a face-lift be typical for someone her age? She’s only 38!

She’s actually right on trend. The old paradigm for face looks is Wait till you’re 50. But this is different. She’s kind of a classic candidate, where you see her looking older when she was in her early 30s. The baby face-lift is great because it’s not having the stigmata of a face-lift. You’re lifting the heaviness, you’re changing the way the face looks, and so that’s why that makes sense. It’s usually late 30s to mid 40s when you do a baby face-lift.

It sounds counterintuitive, but surgery is oftentimes a way of looking more refreshed and natural than the nonsurgical approach, which is to put a bunch of fillers in. This still plays a role, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not the only answer.

Her skin has also changed a lot too—her freckles are gone. Why do you think that is?

With Lindsay’s skin coloration, she’d probably use something like an IPL or BBL. These are light-based lasers that take away the dark spots and freckles. You can essentially erase those. For skin texture, Morpheus is definitely one of the go-tos of creating improved texture. And then things like other lasers and peels, like CoolPeel, can just definitely help just the skin overall. A lot of people think of these lasers as kind of a one-and-done, but it’s more like working out: You want to have some consistency to it to really create those kinds of changes.

What is the upkeep for a look like this?

They say the second you finish on the operating table is the second someone starts to age. And so if you want the longest possible result, take care of your skin. In my practice, patients will do lasers, sometimes as little as once or twice a year. Great skin care products. And then overall, we just have this whole wellness/nutritional talk about stuff that is scientifically based.

Say a patient wants to look like Lindsay. How do you tell your patients that they probably can’t do that?

I think you have to have a very real conversation. Oftentimes when clients come in, they might actually even not want to look like a celebrity, but they want to look like a celebrity in this one exact pose. Because they say, “I like how this person looks here, but I don’t like how they look over here.” And so what I tell them is, “Hey, I get this understanding of the features and aspects of it that you like, and this is something that we can talk about incorporating into your own personal aesthetic.”

How often do folks want to transform their features, versus just go back to looking younger?

I think it’s a combination of both. Sometimes they’ll look at themselves and say, “I never liked this part.” But what a lot of patients say is: “I look at photos of myself in my early 20s, and this is me. This is when I had the magic.” And the magic is different for someone else. For Lindsay, it’s going to be what she looked like on-screen. For someone else, it might be a photo of when they met their significant other, or just on a vacation. They don’t know what to do, oftentimes. They just want something to re-create the magic again.

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