Disneyland is known for a lot of things: the Happiest Place on Earth. A place to walk 20,000 steps a day. A place to buy overpriced Dole Whip. But for Catt Sadler, it’s also a place to forge deep conversations while waiting in 75-minute lines. And so, earlier this spring, it’s where the TV host, podcaster, and entrepreneur decided to tell her two sons, ages 18 and 22, that she was going to undergo a facelift, a neck lift, and blepharoplasty, a type of surgery that removes excess skin from the eyelids.
It’s not the kind of conversation one might expect while waiting in line for A Small World or the Indiana Jones Adventure (it was the latter, actually), but Sadler, the former E! News host who made waves in late 2017, when she alleged that her male cohost was earning double the amount that she was for the same job and subsequently walked away from her work home of 12 years, has never been afraid to stay silent and blend in. It’s why she launched a podcast series about the unspoken truths about middle age, and why she’s opening up about opting for life-changing plastic surgery at the age of 48.
Hollywood is a lot like Fantasyland for some people, but Sadler has always maintained a very grounded and realistic perspective. “We were doing the last Disneyland visit of their childhood,” she says of her sons, who are about to move out on their own. “We’re in this whole seasonal shift in life, and so during this long line at Disneyland, I was like, ‘So I want to tell you guys something that I’m doing.’ My youngest, Arion, was like, ‘Okay, cool. You’re going to feel good about yourself. Knock yourself out, Mom. People do it.’ He was very supportive. Austin, who’s 22, was a little more inquisitive: ‘Why would you do that?’ The idea of a surgery to him is very scary. So he questioned it a little bit, but ultimately I was more concerned about them seeing me in the days after, wrapped in bandages. I didn’t want them to have that vision of their mom in their heads for the rest of their life. So I was like, ‘You guys don’t want to come in my room for five days, I totally understand.’ And they were like, ‘No, we’re good. We’re good.’ They were really sweet and supportive.”
Of course, telling your closest friends and family that you’ve elected to undergo major cosmetic surgery to enhance your looks or slow down the aging process is much different than telling the entire world. But after becoming an unofficial spokesperson for the gender wage gap and seeing how much power there is in speaking up, it’s just another example of how Sadler is finding her purpose by being transparent.
When we meet up at a Los Angeles restaurant three weeks postsurgery, Sadler looks younger, yes, but also truly happy and relieved. Part of it may be that she’s thrilled to be in public, but it’s also because she gets to soon share the results of something she’s been keeping secret for a while. She’s refreshingly honest about the process (she did get a hefty discount on the surgery) and not afraid to describe in graphic detail just how her surgeon achieved the results.
I ask whether she felt societal pressure in electing such major surgery this early in her life, and she says, “I don’t know if it was as much societal pressure,” before adding, “I mean, I’d be lying. I think it was more top of mind when I was on TV every day.”
If anything, it’s clear to me that Sadler wanted to do this for her personal well-being. “It’s not like I did it because I can’t get a job,” she says in between sips of her lentil soup (chewing anything hard is still difficult). “It’s not that I did it because I want my boyfriend to think I look 35. None of that was a consideration. It was more about looking in the mirror and feeling good. How I feel.”
She knows that there will be some people who think she’s too young for this kind of surgery. She understands that there will be those who think she’s perpetuating a culture obsessed with filters and chasing the fountain of youth. But she doesn’t care. Most important, she wants to like what she sees in the mirror and then be of service to those who might want to consider a similar path.
“The feedback’s been a lot of ‘Thank you for telling all sides of what it’s really like to be 48 and what’s available to us,’” she says. “And really just more questions about what to expect and how bad it had hurt and all this stuff. So that’s been nice.”
It’s one of the reasons Sadler has chosen to document her recovery on the text-based subscription service Scriber, launching today. There she’ll share deeply personal videos (including the moment she saw herself for the first time after surgery) and document her recovery in painstaking detail. If she’s going to hear from fans how great she looks, she wants to be brutally honest about the cost—financially, physically, and mentally—that it took to get there.
“I’m not personally judging anyone who keeps these things private, but…I did not want to do that,” she says. “Why not be transparent? Why not inform women about what it can be like?”
Other than a slight, temporary lisp—most likely the result of the muscles in her face readjusting after the surgery—I might have assumed Sadler just came from a very expensive facial and had some maintenance Botox. She certainly didn’t have to be this transparent, but that’s who Catt Sadler is. And frankly, we wouldn't want her to be anything else.
Below, she details how the decision came about, what she didn’t expect leading up to the big day, and what excites her to come.
Glamour: You’re 48 and just had a facelift, a neck lift, and blepharoplasty. What was your approach to aging before this surgery?
Catt Sadler: Probably like most women my age: I’ve done injectables, I’ve done Botox and Xeomin, which is another injectable brand name that I love. I’ve done a little bit of filler over time. I didn’t do Botox for the first time until I was 35, so this is all in the last decade-plus. I am such a fan of beauty treatments. I’ve also done microneedling. I even tried Morpheus. Some of those are more intense than others, but up until now, I have never done anything surgically to my face, ever.
When you first started using various injectables, was there a specific reason or was it something offered to you, as many beauty and skin care treatments are when you’re in the public eye?
I definitely sought it out as a way to improve my looks. I had two kids, I was in my mid-30s. I was on TV every day. And so I was like, “Oh, you mean I can soften these fine lines?” Or, “Oh, I can limit the appearance of my crow’s-feet?” It was like, Why wouldn’t I do that? So I had such a good experience with it. But I wanted to always approach it really conservatively and not look frozen. I love expression. I speak for a living. I want my eyes to move. And luckily, I think I always was able to maintain that.
Was there anything you tried along the way that you weren’t happy with?
I remember getting filler underneath my eyes seven or eight years ago. I was really hollow under my eyes, and I was really thin at the time. I looked like I hadn’t slept in months, so I thought filler would fix that. And it did. But I’ve never gotten filler under my eyes since because it’s really painful. I don’t need to do that again. When I had it done, they go in your cheek and stick the needle all the way up. I just remember it hurting really badly. Those are those moments when you’re like, Wait, why do I care about vanity? Because in that moment it’s not nice.
You mentioned you’ve done fillers and injectables since you were 35, but what changed for you to consider surgery?
In the last two to three years, I have been overwhelmingly interested in the midlife years for women—bloating, hormones, mood swings, irregular periods. All the parts of getting older were really kind of tumbling down on me personally. And I noticed that every time I talked to my social media or podcast audience about it, the response was really huge and positive. There’s such a stigma attached to perimenopause and what our bodies are going through and the changes that we’re experiencing and why we can’t sleep at night and we’re having hot flashes and it fucking sucks. Why aren’t people talking about it? So that kind of launched a lot of content-driven interest about midlife in general.
Then in the last three to six months, I began a video series that’s texted to your phone through Scriber, and the intent was to be really raw and very personal in my shares about what I am going through personally, and also the journalist in me educating people about it. For instance, what do we need to know about hormone replacement therapy? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? But along with the health part came the physical vanity aging piece.
Tell me specifics.
Our bodies are changing, our asses are sagging, our faces are losing volume. How does that make you feel as a woman? How does that affect your relationships? All of that. In the last couple years especially, it started bugging me when I was looking in the mirror more than ever before. I was like, Why do I look so tired? Or why in photos do I look sad? And your lips literally just start going down because of gravity. So my resting face was a face of sadness or exhaustion. It didn’t really matter that I do hot yoga. Or that I eat really well. Or take my supplements. I do so much to live a healthy life, but the expression of that was not coming across in my face.
I knew Botox wasn’t going to fix my sagging face and my little chicken neck. I was like, What can I do? My mother had a facelift when she was 54, but this was like 25 years ago. And so I went to [Beverly Hills plastic surgeon] Steve Kim because he’s the guy I trust and he’s a very skilled surgeon. I booked a consultation to see what he thought. I really did not go in there saying, “I want to get a facelift.” I told him what was bothering me, mainly the jowly sagginess in photos. It was like everything was pooling right around the lower half of my face and neck.
And then he said—which kind of surprised me—that I could consider a facelift, a neck lift, and while I’m at it, my eyes. I was like, “Oh, shit!” I didn’t really expect him to say that would be what can fix that. But I don’t know why I was being so naive either.
I can understand why. For a lot of us who are children of the ’70s or ’80s, we associate the idea of having a facelift with people in their 60s or 70s or 80s. We don’t expect to hear that suggested to us in our 40s.
Exactly. And that’s what I said. I was like, “Oh wow. Is it time?” He was like, “Catt, there’s actually no better time. If you wait until, say, 10 years from now and you have more visible signs of permanent aging, deeper wrinkles, more sagging, less volume, and then you do a facelift, it’s quite obvious. The before and afters are going to be pretty drastic. It’s like you’re going from looking of a certain age to suddenly snatched.” So he was like, “I think at this age we can still achieve a really natural look. It’ll hold you for another 10 to 12 years.” It was also explained to me that there are advantages to doing it now because, when you’re younger, your recovery is supposed to be better. You heal a little quicker. The cellular health is just going to do its part a little bit better the younger you are.
We talked through what recovery would look like, because that was a huge consideration, obviously. How long would I be out of the game? I have to work. My kids are graduating. I also talked to my boyfriend because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t going to freak out. And I talked to my mom, consulted with some friends.
What did your agents or managers say when you approached them to let them know about the surgery?
I certainly didn’t ask permission. But I did give them a heads-up that I’m going to be MIA for a little bit. I don’t know what anybody says behind closed doors, but to me they were all like, “Good for you. Okay, great. When are you back in commission? Can’t wait to see.” I’m kind of past needing the endorsement of others to conduct my life. I’m telling you, that’s one of the better parts of the aging process, is you do know yourself more and you do make choices for yourself and what’s right for you without seeking the approval of everybody else. That’s pretty nice.
Absolutely. But when you walked out of the doctor’s office, was there a part of you that felt depressed or annoyed that this was what was recommended?
No, I was excited, actually. I got excited because I thought, Oh, there is a fix. It’s available to me. Two to three weeks’ downtime. It’s summer. And so I got excited with the hope of it. And then, to be really honest, because I was doing the Midlife and Me series, I was like, How cool would it be to bring everybody along? I immediately went into the “Go on this journey with me” vibe and…I was ignited with enthusiasm.
It’s so interesting that you were told that if you wait to do this 10 years or so from now, people will automatically know you did something, whereas if you have a facelift now, people might think you just came back from vacation or just had a beauty treatment. And yet you want to put it out there now, which I find refreshing. You don’t want people speculating.
I did have to consider that, because of course that went through my mind. I was like, What are people going to think? Who’s going to judge me? But I think one of the best parts about getting older is giving zero fucks what people think of you.
It really irks me that people watch social media and it’s being served up in a way from a lot of public figures that how they look is because of going on hikes or sleeping for a month, or I did a little laser treatment when it’s a bigger commitment than that. I’m not personally judging anyone else, but I knew that for me, I did not want to do that. I was like, Why not be transparent? Why not inform women about what it can be like? And so, yeah, I really don’t have many reservations about putting it all out there.
Do you think the overwhelmingly positive response you got from your very public exit from E! News in 2017 empowered you to be more honest about things and how you want to live your life?
I’m so glad you brought that up because, without question, that was such a seismic shift in my life. Truth is everything. I just feel like you cannot lose if you’re telling the truth. And that applies to everything. It applies to your job, your profession, your relationships. It pertains to everything. So yes, that’s why I see this as a step in my own power. I really do. It doesn’t have to be chalked up to an insecurity or an inadequacy or a lack of self-love or a lack of worth, because you don’t like what you see in the mirror. I’m solution-based. So I think, What’s available to us today? And maybe I’ll take advantage of that. And then by the way, I’ll tell the truth about it.
What that does is help move the needle for other people to feel less alone and more empowered. It doesn’t even have to be something as big as plastic surgery. So, getting back to your consultation, how soon after did you decide to move forward with the surgery?
I mean, probably a week later. The surgery was then booked for May 22. I think I got there at 6:30 that morning and I left at 1:30 in the afternoon. It wasn’t bad. But what I would say to anyone considering this is how important it is to really take really good care of yourself prior to the surgery. I was burning the candle at both ends because I was stacking my work in advance. My son was graduating. I had family flying into town. I was hosting a big party. I had flown to Houston to host something for the United Way. I was so rundown, and I went into the surgery with nothing left in the tank. I think it’s taking me a little longer to recover because I think I was maybe even sick during the surgery. I was never diagnosed with actually being sick with something, but even Dr. Kim said the recovery felt harder for me than most.
That’s so interesting.
I have, I think, a really high pain tolerance. I pushed out two kids. I love tattoos. I’m not afraid of pain. But I was really miserable that first week. Really miserable. So that was a little scary because I was really uncomfortable.
But you have to do a lot of medical clearance leading up to the surgery. You have to get a chest X-ray, you have to get an EKG, you have to do blood tests. And some of the technicians, through that experience, were actually trying to talk me out of it, saying, “Don’t get online and look at the pictures from surgery.” They were trying to impress upon me the gravity of this surgery, which I appreciate.
It sounds kind of overwhelming.
I just kept trying to focus on how, in six months, it’s going to look great. I’m going to feel so good. This is a gift to myself. I’m going to be so happy. I’m not going to use this many filters on Instagram. All those little things.
It’s been three weeks since surgery. How has the recovery been after those first few rough days?
I have a little mobility in my jaw, so it’s almost like I’m relearning my bite a little. It’s been explained to me that those are the nerves reattaching, and the muscles are weak, so everything’s kind of getting back to where it was. And it takes a minute for all that to get back together.
Soups for a week, smoothies for a week, mashed potatoes, oatmeal. It was a solid week of no solids. And I’m still not 100%. But I’m not alarmed about it because every day I’m improving, and there’s been no infections. But all the more reason why I’m trying to take care of myself and not get rundown. I’m really trying to force myself to stay in bed, not overdo it, and just let my body do what it’s got to do.
Because I will say the other big thing that most doctors will tell you, as did Dr. Kim, is that some women get depressed after this. They look in the mirror and don’t recognize who they see. It is a long game. You can get back to life, but don’t expect full results for even six months to a year. So there is an anxious feeling, a mildly depressed feeling. And I think I experienced that a little bit. It’s not an uplifting time, let’s put it that way.
I didn’t fully think of this part prior to the surgery, but my doctor explained that it’s not just your skin that gets pulled and then cut. The actual muscles in your face are also moved. My boyfriend, Greg, said it best in that “it’s like you took your face off and put it back on, basically.” It kind of is. I opted to put my staples in my hairline, but that kind of almost widens your temple space because all of this goes back further than it used to be. Otherwise, your scars are more visible and I didn’t want that.
Let’s talk about the cost of something like this. It is a major commitment.
The cost is major. It’s a major life investment. It’s like a car or a down payment on a house. I only got my consultation from my doctor, but I've heard it can cost six figures for the three surgeries I had. But Dr. Kim, I think his price for the neck lift, the facelift, and the eye job is $30,000 to $40,000. I got a sizable discount because I am talking about it publicly and I am sharing all my photos. And even so, I still had to think if I could afford it, even with the discount. One of my sons is going to college. I’m a single, independent, working mom. I have my own business. So it’s not like the surgery was a no-brainer for me by any means.
So when you look in the mirror now, how do you feel?
I feel like myself, which is good. I still feel like I have a chipmunk face because I’m swollen, but I know that’s not going to last. I know it’s going to settle with each day. So I feel really good. I feel like I did the right thing. I feel like, Wow, I can’t believe that this is possible.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Jessica Radloff is the Glamour senior West Coast editor and author of the NYT best-selling book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series. You can follow her on Instagram at @jessicaradloff14.