After revealing earlier this week that she got a facelift a few months ago, Rosie O’Donnell is sharing before-and-after pictures that highlight the subtle results.
The actor, 64, revealed on Monday in a Substack essay that she underwent a lower deep plane facelift in January. This procedure only lifts tissue under the facial muscles to avoid the skin looking too tight.
“THE B4 & AFTER — story on substack,” she captioned the photo.
In her essay, the “A League of Their Own” star opened up about struggling with the decision to undergo cosmetic surgery, something she said she’d never thought she’d do. But, she added, losing 50 pounds on the prescription weight-loss drug Mounjaro started to change her mindset.
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts. Not casually — morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never — ever.
“I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds…” she wrote.
O’Donnell said the dramatic weight loss resulted in additional wrinkles on her face that gave her a “haunted” look.
At first, she tried to be “evolved” about her new look, telling herself, “This is natural. This is earned.”
But soon O’Donnell found herself asking, “Umm how earned does it have to look?”
The former daytime talk show host recalled that while researching procedures, her 13-year-old child, Clay, pressured her to avoid surgery, telling her, “Young women look up to you.”
“I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it,” added Clay.
Clay’s comments reminded O’Donnell of her own previous “morally rigid” stance regarding plastic surgery and caused her to abandon the idea for months, she wrote.
“And then I had this quiet realization: if I’m teaching Clay anything, it can’t be that my body belongs to an idea either. 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,” she wrote.
O’Donnell, who lives in Ireland with Clay, found a doctor she “trusted,” someone who worked on friends of hers who all “still looked like themselves.” She decided to go forward with the surgery.
O’Donnell’s facelift has made her look “a slightly more well-rested emotionally stable version of me,” she wrote.
She added that, ironically, “not one person” in her life has noticed she’d had work done.
“Not a friend, not a stranger, not even people who owe me compliments,” she joked. “I went through a full existential feminist crisis, had my face and neck surgically altered, and the result is… zippo.
“Which honestly is the best possible outcome,” she wrote.
“I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else — I just stopped arguing with the mirror. And maybe that’s enough,” she added.
