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Rosie O'Donnell got a facelift—and she has some thoughts to share.
The comedian and actor revealed this week that she had a lower deep-plane facelift in January, sharing her complicated feelings on Substack in her now-signature poetic style. In the post, titled “decisions,” O'Donnell wrote that she had always sworn she'd never go under the knife. After losing 50 pounds, she changed her mind.
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts,” O'Donnell wrote. “Not casually—morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never ever.” She went on to say that getting a facelift felt like a “betrayal” of feminism and aging, even of “our team of women worldwide.” But after her weight loss, O'Donnell said her face changed to a point that “I'd look in the mirror and think – this isn't aging, this is melting with intention.” She tried to accept it, and couldn't: “There's a point where acceptance starts to feel like lying.”
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O'Donnell's 13-year-old child, Clay, found out that she was contemplating a facelift and had their their own thoughts, saying O'Donnell “earned” her wrinkles and that young women look up to her. What kind of message would she be sending about aging and acceptance if she got plastic surgery? And then this: “‘I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.’” (“That's a big statement from someone who still needs you to open jars.”) According to O'Donnell, Clay sounded “exactly like me. Like my younger, more certain, more morally rigid self had somehow moved into my house and was now judging my face.”
O'Donnell sat for a few months with the idea of getting a facelift, then realized that not doing would also send her child a message. “If I’m teaching Clay anything, it can’t be that my body belongs to an idea either,” she wrote. “Even a good idea. Even feminism. Because that’s still not freedom—that’s just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face.” Her words echo those of Allure contributor Joan Kron, who said of her three facelifts: “The feminist line is, 'We've earned these wrinkles. We don't want to erase them.' Well, I’m a feminist, but I don’t believe in telling people what to do with their bodies.”
About five months ago, O'Donnell had the surgery, choosing a doctor who had worked on some of her friends, “who all still looked like themselves, just like they had recently been told good news.” Her goal: “to still be me, just…less haunted. And I do look like me…a slightly more well-rested, emotionally stable version of me.” So what was the response to the results, after all that self-reflection and “a full existential feminist crisis”? O'Donnell says no one has even noticed she had work done, “not one person. Not a friend, not a stranger, not even people who owe me compliments / My teenager has not said a word.”
But O'Donnell is pleased with that. “I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else. I just stopped arguing with the mirror. And maybe that’s enough. Or at the very least…it’s what a lower, deep plane face lift [sic] looks like when it minds its own business.” A day after the Substack post went live, she shared before and after photos on her Instagram.
O'Donnell joins the ranks of celebrities who have been open about their work recently. Denise Richards told Allure all about her recent facelift and even shared the actual, clinical before-and-after pics. A day after O'Donnell's post went live, Glamour published an interview with TV personality Keltie Knight in which she shared details about her own facelift. Then there's Ricki Lake, and Kathy Griffin, and of course Kris Jenner.
O'Donnell ended her post by saying that while she knows she doesn't owe anyone an explanation for her decision to have plastic surgery, she doesn't like secrets. “Part of my desire to show myself…is to come clean,” she wrote. “But who do I owe that truth to? Is it mine to keep?” She writes of feeling “almost shameful” of her “privileged place” in the world, noting that the surgery cost “more money than I have ever paid for a car.” But at 64, O'Donnell says that despite her still-conflicted feelings, she and her “new lower face and neck” are “just happy to be alive…able to feel and choose and use my voice whenever I feel called to…as we carry on in act 3.”
