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Rosie O’Donnell is pulling back the curtain on her recent cosmetic procedure.
One day after sharing that she underwent a facelift, O’Donnell, 64, took to Instagram to reveal side-by-side photos of her before and after.
“THE B4 & AFTER,” O’Donnell captioned the Wednesday, May 27, post showcasing her results and shared that her story was on Substack.
In a lengthy poem titled “Decisions” shared via her Substack, O’Donnell got candid about why she went through with it despite previously being against the procedure.
“I used to feel very strongly about facelifts. Not casually – morally. I had assigned myself as head of all women who would never — ever,” she wrote. “I thought it was a betrayal. Of feminism. Of aging. Of our team of women worldwide. And then I lost 50 pounds…”
She continued, “It wasn’t wrinkles — it was gravity. I’d look in the mirror and think — this isn’t aging, this is melting with intention. I tried to be evolved about it. and say things like, ‘This is natural. This is earned.’ And then … ‘Umm how earned does it have to look?’ There’s a point where acceptance starts to feel like lying.”
As O’Donnell began to gather “information” about the procedure, her child Clay, 13, found out she was considering going under the knife and tried to change her mind. (O’Donnell is also the mother of Vivienne, Blake, Chelsea and Parker.)
“‘You earned your wrinkles,’” she recalled Clay telling her. “Which — first of all — rude. But also … correct. Then Clay said, ‘Young women look up to you.’ And finally — with strong effect — ‘I wouldn’t be able to respect you if you did it.’ And that one … landed.”
O’Donnell noted that Clay sounded “exactly” like her younger self, which “really threw [her].” O’Donnell ended up delaying “the whole thing for months,” while continuing to think about it. Ultimately, O’Donnell realized she needed to teach Clay that bodies do not “belong to an idea.”
“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 explained. “I want [Clay] to grow up in a world where they don’t feel like they have to change, but also know they can, if they want to, without losing moral standing in their own life.”
In January, O’Donnell underwent the cosmetic procedure.
“Right before I went under, I grabbed my doctor’s hand and said, ‘I will never say, ‘God, I wish you did more.’” And I meant it,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to become that voice — the one that keeps moving the goalpost, never satisfied, the one that turns their own face into a problem one can never quite solve. 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.”
Since then, O’Donnell claimed that “no one has noticed” a change in her face.
“I didn’t disappear, I didn’t become someone else — I just stopped arguing with the mirror,” she added. “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 concluded, “As I get ready for the last day of school with my youngest — the caboose — here at 64 years old, with a new lower face and neck, 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 three, this is me.”
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