For her job, Erica Wolfe frequently shows off her face.

It’s splashed on glitzy billboards across Jupiter, Fla., where the 38-year-old mom of two works as a realtor. It appears in photos and videos on the social media feeds of her real estate company, The Wolfe Team. It’s the first thing her clients see during a home walk-through and her peers in the industry see when she speaks at a conference.

Over the past few years, she has started to use filters or ask her video editor to smooth out her under-eye area.

“My eye started literally sagging, to the point where I’d always have mascara here,” she tells PEOPLE, pointing to the space just below her eyebrow. She was ready for a cosmetic intervention.

Back in 2023, Wolfe, with the help of her injector and nurse practitioner, got herself on the two-year waitlist for a consultation at Fifth Avenue Plastic Surgery, a luxury cosmetic center in Delray Beach. During those two years, her life changed quite a bit.

Wolfe divorced her husband, putting an end to a 15-year relationship. Wolfe also became an empty nester after her youngest graduated from high school. And she lost 28 pounds, starting regular pilates classes and changing her diet with her kids out of the house.

“I kind of felt like right now is the first time in my life that it’s about me, so I could do whatever the hell I wanted without it affecting anyone else,” she says.

When she went in for her consultation in July, initially anticipating she would just be getting a lower blepharoplasty — a surgical procedure that removes skin and fat from the lower eyelid to reduce the appearance of bags — Wolfe decided that she might as well discuss with her doctor her droopier jowls, a byproduct of her recent weight loss.

“We kind of just started adding stuff,” she says, laughing while she recalls the consultation. By the end of her appointment, she was sold on a deep plane face and neck lift, a platysmaplasty, an upper lip lift, a midface lipografting and an endoscopic browlift.

The total cost? $78,000.

“If I am doing this, there is no later,” she says, explaining why it made sense to get so many procedures at once. “If I am going to be out, let’s just do it all.”

Her intentions have always been just to “tweak some things” — the features that she typically smooths over in photos of herself — but never to transform into an entirely new person.

“If the next 20 years of my life, I can enjoy me time and be selfish and look the way I want to look or feel really good about myself, I’m going to do it,” she says. “It was never about being scared of getting old. I don’t think I’m old. I don’t think I looked old.”

And there wasn’t anyone in her life who discouraged her from going through the procedure, she adds, because they knew nothing they would say could dissuade her once she had made up my mind.

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While she didn’t think twice about that eye-popping price tag — “I just put it on my Amex so I could get the points,” she says cheekily when asked if she had set aside savings to afford the surgeries — that has only recently become her financial reality.

When Wolfe got pregnant at 17, she tells PEOPLE, her parents completely cut her off, throwing her into poverty with a newborn. As she was raising her kids, she worked multiple jobs, lived off of food stamps, and was often days late to pay the bill for their daycare.

“I’ve busted my butt working,” she says of the last two decades. Slowly, Wolfe built what she jokingly describes as the “MLM” of real estate, selling real estate resources to a network of over 1,400 other agents.

In 2017, Wolfe got a nose job — her first cosmetic procedure — and had another one to correct it several years later. But that was child’s play, she says, in comparison to the surgery she received this fall.

In the week before the surgery, Wolfe had to swear off alcohol and avoid salts and high-fat foods. Two weeks before going under the knife, she started taking vitamins, nine different prescription medications and hydrating like crazy.

“I was like, ‘This is going to be more intense,’ ” she says. “But I think other people were more nervous for me. I was like, ‘I’m going to be drugged. I’m going to be asleep.’ ”

When she woke up from the surgery around 9 p.m., she was parched and her head was throbbing. “I don’t really remember the pain,” she says. “I kind of think it’s like childbirth — people go back and have kids again because they forget the physical pain of it.”

The recovery was no joke: The doctors sent her with a laundry list of daily tasks to take care of her new face, including lots and lots of Aquaphor, as all of the skin on her face started peeling off. Wolfe had to have a live-in nurse for the two nights after her surgery just to help her keep track of it all.

She got her first look at the results while she was still at her surgeon’s office, but her face was so swollen and peeling for the first few days that she assured herself it would be hard to really get a sense of the results. But as the recovery dragged on, she started to get anxious.

Says Wolfe: “I think it was around day 10, I was looking at myself and the peel had come off, and I was like, ‘What the f— did I do?’ ”

Her doctor did warn her that the healing process wouldn’t be complete for three months, but she says it’s still been a “real big mental struggle” to feel unsatisfied by how she looks when her body feels physically fine, but her face is still swollen.

“I feel like I walk around looking like a pumpkin head — that if someone took a pin to me, my head would burst,” she says. “I know I’m swollen. I just keep trying to tell myself, ‘You’re swollen.’ ”

She’s also had a hard time with the new shininess of her face and her recent acne breakouts as someone with previously pretty clear skin: “I got cosmetic surgery to look better, and now I have whiteheads all over my face.”

Still, there are plenty of parts of the procedure that she’s quite happy with: She loves her new lips, upper eyes and the smoothness of her neck. It’s mostly the midsection of her face, around her cheekbones, where she still feels puffy.

But — as she chats with PEOPLE just over a month after her procedure — she maintains that she doesn’t regret any of the surgeries. If she had to do anything differently, Wolfe says, it would be having her live-in nurse arranged ahead of her surgery, rather than scrambling at the last minute to find one after she woke up from the anesthesia.

“I handle pain tolerance pretty well. I just go with the flow of stuff, so I was like, ‘I’ll just be fine,’ ” she says. “But the amount of third-party help I needed — I didn’t understand that.”

Throughout her healing process, Erica has also opened the floodgates to the internet’s opinions, posting near-daily updates about the state of her face to her thousands of followers on TikTok. The reaction, naturally, has been fairly mixed, ranging from those who find her videos useful in planning their own cosmetic procedures to those telling her she has made a huge mistake.

“I’m so thick-skinned to the internet — they’re not the first person to say something mean to me online,” she says, noting that she’s been sharing her life on social media professionally for over a decade. “The comments — I actually enjoy reading them, and I laugh at some of them.”

She’s also well aware that, as a recent divorcee, her recent cosmetic procedures may have the appearance of a midlife crisis to the average outside observer, her ex-husband included.

“Maybe it is!” she laughs. “I can only imagine the screenshots that are getting sent to him.”

“I was too young to have kids. My whole life, I have been too young. So if I’m too young to do this, maybe it’s just par for the course,” she continues. “But I really do hope, though, that this one works for me, and when those three months are up, it’s like, ‘Holy s—, she looks good.’ I’m hopeful.”