Keltie Knight is opening up candidly about her journey with plastic surgery. The Live from E! host detailed her decision to undergo a facelift in 2023, admitting that at the time, she was fixated on "every little thing" she perceived as imperfections in her appearance from years spent in front of the camera. Despite the fact that the then-41-year-old, who had previously undergone a neck lift at age 35, encountered complications during the procedure.
"My surgery was initially supposed to be three or four hours, but instead, it lasted 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, threads, microneedling, and all the medi-spa treatments I had done that it was basically frying my face underneath."
The surgery also coincided with a particularly difficult period in her life as the entertainment journalist had been diagnosed with microcytic anemia—a blood disorder—and eventually underwent a hysterectomy in 2024 to alleviate 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."
Although 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."
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 friends 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 author of F--k Them Theory: Self-Help for People Who Are Done Being the Bigger Person 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 while my husband literally worked out of town 300 days last year, working a high-pressure Hollywood job, doing my podcast, mentoring, and charity work. And I was tired."
"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 present at 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."
