Lena Dunham has shared what a plastic surgeon told her when she asked for guidance ahead of turning 40.
The actor and creator, best known for HBO’s Girls and her more recent work on Too Much, said she booked an appointment as her milestone birthday on May 13 approached.
In a TikTok uploaded earlier this week, she explained:
“So I am going to be 40 in about a month.
“I know it shocks you, blows your mind, and I went to go see a doctor, a dermatologist. She also is a plastic surgeon. Let’s call it what it is. She’s a plastic surgeon.
“I said to her, ‘If I were to fully let you loose on my face, money were no object, healing were no object, just tell me what would you do?’”
Dunham said she expected the doctor to shut the idea down, but the response was more measured than she anticipated.
“She looked at me and she said, ‘I wouldn’t go crazy. I like to really highlight my client’s natural beauty,’” Dunham said.
She then added that the surgeon seemed to single out what she considered Dunham’s strongest features—an area running from between her eyebrows to just under her nose.
“Okay, so I was like okay, so what you can see through a criminal ski mask? And the rest you would obliterate in a meat grinder basically?” Dunham said.
Dunham is also preparing for the release of her memoir, Famesick, due out Tuesday (April 14). The book looks back at her early years in the public eye, including how rising fame overlapped with the emergence of intense social media commentary. It also touches on her health, chronic illness, complicated personal relationships, and the emotional effects of becoming well-known at a young age.
“If Girls had all appeared when I was a fully formed person, at 33, I would’ve understood how to handle that work, that place, those gifts, those people in a different way. But it was, basically, that I got everything I could’ve dreamed of at a time when I had no ability to handle it. And it required a rebuilding, and I’m very happy with where I landed, and very lucky. That’s just life, I guess,” Dunham told the Guardian.
She previously addressed the criticism she received during that period in a social media post shared last April.
“The feedback that came at me-at least the feedback I could hear-was about all the ways that young body was unacceptable,” Dunham wrote.
“I didn’t know how grateful I would come to be for it all.
“As a result of my years dabbling in the comments section, the shifts in my human form – aging, illness, scrapes and scars – haven’t rattled me like they could have. This body had already been an object of scorn and so the rest of the road smoothed out before me.”