Comedian, actress, and former talk show host Rosie O’Donnell admitted in an emotional essay on May 26, 2026, that despite insisting for decades that she’d never get a facelift, she wound up going under the knife earlier this year.
O’Donnell, 64, shared a snippet of her Substack essay via Instagram and posted a current photo of herself, looking happy in a spring green sweater, and began her post by writing, “I used to feel very strongly about facelifts … Not casuallyâmorally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never – ever”
Rosie O’Donnell Says She Reconsidered Her Stance on Facelifts After Losing 50 Pounds
Despite insisting for years she’d never get a facelift, writing that she “thought it was a betrayal” of feminism, aging, and “our team of women worldwide,” O’Donnell said that after losing 50 pounds in 2025, she began to notice how much her face had changed.
O’Donnell was open about her weight loss, sharing in May 2025 that she’d been using Monjauro for her Type 2 diabetes and had also stopped employing a personal chef. But the positive results had a negative impact on her face, she thought.
“It wasnât wrinkles,” she wrote in her May 25 essay, “it was gravity … Iâd look in the mirror and think, this isnât aging, this is⦠melting with intention.”
O’Donnell said she wrestled for months with her conflicting emotions, but eventually, trying to be “accepting” of her changing face felt “like lying.” The entertainer wrote on Substack that her kids were staunchly against the idea of her getting a facelift, reminding her of how rigid she’d been about the idea when she was younger.
“And then I had this quiet realization,” O’Donnell wrote, noting that she didn’t want to teach her kids “that my body belongs to an idea either. Even a good idea. Even feminism.”
“Because that’s still not freedom,” she continued. “That’s just a different authority telling you what you’re allowed to do with your own face.”
Rosie O’Donnell Says No One Has Noticed Her Subtle Facelift
O’Donnell wrote in her essay that she had her facelift in January, assuring fans, “I found a doctor I trustedâsomeone who had worked on friends of mine who all still looked like themselves, just like they had recently been told good news.”
O’Donnell didn’t want a major transformation that left her looking different. Rather, she wrote, “I wanted a limit.
I wanted to still be me, just⦠less haunted. And I do look like me – A slightly more well-rested emotionally stable version of me.”
In fact, the entertainer revealed that since her surgery, “no one has noticed, not one person,” from friends to strangers, which she said was “the best possible outcome.”
“I didn’t disappear,” she wrote. “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 looks like when it minds its own business.”
O’Donnell admitted that her facelift “cost more money than I have ever paid for a car — my privileged place in this world, and that feels almost shameful to me.”
But in the end, she said moving forward with a “new lower face and neck” was bringing her new confidence and peace, writing that she was “just happy to be alive … Able to feel and choose … And use my voice … Whenever I feel called to … For the girl I was … The woman I am … And all those joining my ranks as we carry on in act 3 …
This is me”
Fans flooded O’Donnell’s Instagram post with kind words, including one who called her a “Cutie patootie ð¥â¤ï¸” — a nickname she frequently called her guests on “The Rosie O’Donnell Show,” which aired from 1996 to 2002.
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