Ruby Tuesday Matthews didn’t expect her own phone to treat her like a stranger.
The 33-year-old Australian influencer and mother of three traveled from Byron Bay to Ilchi Clinic in Seoul for an endoscopic facelift on Friday, August 21. The surgery lasted four hours, and as soon as it was over, she went back to the hotel to sleep, with drainage tubes running along her body. Her goal, she said, was never to change her appearance: she wanted to look “fresher and more awake” and regain some of the volume her face had lost over time.
The next morning, with the drain and tapes removed, she discovered an unexpected problem: her iPhone’s Face ID didn’t recognize her. Since almost all her apps require two-factor verification, she couldn’t even open her messages, so she ended up at an Apple Store. “My face is like an inflated balloon with slits for eyes”, she said. And she thought that was the worst of it, until the swelling reached its peak on the third day: she had to sleep sitting up and admitted that her face had never been so swollen.
Matthews decided to show everything because she didn’t want to pretend she’d woken up ten years younger overnight. “I didn’t have surgery to become someone else”, she replied to a follower’s criticism. “What you see now is swelling, not a new face, and I’m not going to be ashamed of being honest.”
