Watch: Keltie Knight Says Facelift Took 9 Hours Due to Scar Tissue From Fillers and Microneedling
Keltie Knight is getting candid about her plastic surgery journey.
The Live from E!host detailed her decision to have a facelift in 2023, admitting that at the time she found she was fixating on “every little thing” she saw wrong in her own appearance from years spent in front of the camera. Although for the then-41-year-old—who had gotten a neck lift at 35—the procedure wasn’t without its complications.
“My surgery was initially supposed to be three or four hours, and instead it was almost nine,” Keltie wrote in a personal essay for Glamour. “That’s because when Dr. [Jason] Diamond pulled back my face, there was so much scar tissue from the filler and the threads and the microneedling and all the medi-spa s–t I had done that it was basically frying my face underneath.”
The surgery also came at a particularly difficult time in her life as the entertainment journalist had been diagnosed with microcytic anemia—a blood disorder—and eventually had a hysterectomy in 2024 to ease her symptoms.
“I wanted to do the facelift before taking care of an actual medical issue,” the 44-year-old wrote. “I was disgusted with myself. It was like, I want to die because of my uterine condition, but I’m going to fix my face first.”
Though she said it was “the best thing I ever did even though it was so expensive,” she still felt the stigma attached to the procedure.
She admitted that she “felt shame about actually going through with it,” adding, “I didn’t really know if I was going to tell anyone.”
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That is until Rachel Zoe’s birthday party, which was being filmed for The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
“Dorit Kemsley came over and said, ‘You’re aging backward,’” Keltie recalled. “I threw out the thing that no one—except my two best gays and my husband—knew. I said, ‘Thanks. I had a facelift.’”
Though she didn’t intend to say it on camera, she agreed for it to air on the show.
“I thought, You know what?” the F–k Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person author wrote. “Just own it. I had written this big chapter for my book about doing whatever the f–k you want to your face and how I want to stop the drama of judgment. What if it’s good to admit you got a f–king facelift at 41? What if that actually is freeing?”
Elsewhere in her deeply candid essay, she detailed her experience with GLP-1s, which she said helped her lose “like seven or eight pounds that have stayed off.”
“Why are we so mad at women who take the ‘easy’ way out? Is life not hard enough?” she wrote. “If I wanted to lose five pounds, I absolutely could have. However, I was dealing with my brother being hospitalized, taking care of my house when my husband literally worked out of town 300 days last year, working a high-pressure Hollywood job, doing my podcast, mentoring, doing charity work. And I was tired.”
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“I just wanted losing weight to be easy for once,” Keltie continued. “And it was. I lost the weight, and then I was inspired by my body and got back into Pilates.”
Now, after years of feeling like she was letting herself “be eaten alive by the Hollywood machine,” the LadyGang podcast host feels confident in herself and the choices she made.
“This past awards season was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Keltie, who is on every major red carpet for E!, said. “I was back to being a delusional girl. Maybe that’s the beauty of being post-facelift. I don’t know. But I’m so much more confident at 44 than I was at 34. I know who I am. I know I’m good at my job. I know I slay the boots down on a red carpet. And you can’t tell me that my bob isn’t bobbing, honey.”
For more stars who have been candid about their own cosmetic procedures, keep reading.
The F–k Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person hits shelves Nov. 17.
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