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Rosie O’Donnell revealed in a Substack poem Monday that she got a deep-plane facelift in January, after years of publicly vowing never to have cosmetic surgery.
Rosie O’Donnell told the world about her deep-plane facelift the way only Rosie O’Donnell would: in a Substack-published poem titled Decisions, posted Monday, May 25.
The procedure happened in January. The 64-year-old comedian, who had spent decades publicly framing cosmetic surgery as a feminist betrayal, walked through her arc from absolutist to convert in a long verse-and-prose essay.
The trigger was weight loss. After dropping 50 pounds, O’Donnell wrote, the issue wasn’t wrinkles, it was gravity. “I’d look in the mirror and think, this isn’t aging, this is melting with intention,” she wrote.
The Cut’s walkthrough of the poem and the broader cultural moment around deep-plane facelifts notes that the procedure has become its own celebrity sub-genre. Kris Jenner recently went public with hers (courtesy of Dr. Steven Levine); now O’Donnell joins her.
The most striking section of the poem concerns her 13-year-old child Clay, who objected when O’Donnell first started gathering information. Clay told her: “You earned your wrinkles.” Then: “Young women look up to you.” Then: “I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.”
That last one landed. O’Donnell delayed the surgery for months after Clay’s pushback, sitting with the conflict between her younger, more rigid self and the choice she wanted to make.
Us Weekly’s coverage of the poem and the family conversation that preceded the surgery tracks the eventual reconciliation. O’Donnell decided that teaching Clay that bodies belong to an idea, even a feminist idea, was its own kind of unfreedom. She booked the procedure in January.
The surgery happened with a doctor who had worked on friends. Before going under, O’Donnell told him she would never wish he had done more. She wanted, in her words, to still be herself, just less haunted.
The reveal has its own confession structure. The poem also addresses the cost, which O’Donnell said was more than she has ever paid for a vehicle, and which she described as gross excess. She framed her silence about the procedure since January as mirroring the closeted period of her early career in ’90s and 2000s entertainment.
The result, per O’Donnell, has been invisible. Page Six’s writeup of the poem and the broader honesty wave it’s part of notes that no one, including Clay, friends, or strangers, had said a word about her changed appearance. “I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else,” she wrote. “I just stopped arguing with the mirror.”
O’Donnell is mother to five: Clay, Vivienne, Blake, Chelsea, and Parker. The Substack post is her most extensive personal essay in recent months.
She is not alone in the honesty wave. The same Monday saw LadyGang co-creator Keltie Knight reveal her own facelift in a Glamour essay, calling the procedure couture and admitting the same shame O’Donnell described.
The poem ends with O’Donnell positioning the reveal as advocacy for choice. “Just happy to be alive,” she wrote, “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 three.”
This is act three.
