Personally is Glamour’s first-person series featuring deeply personal stories from women shaping culture in their own words. Below, Keltie Knight—Emmy-winning broadcaster, podcaster, and E! cohost—reflects on facelifts, GLP-1s, Hollywood beauty pressure, and the hard-earned confidence she finally found in her 40s.
Nine years ago I noticed what I call a little wattle in my neck. I’m on camera for a living, so it’s hard not to fixate on every little thing you don’t love about your appearance, and I couldn’t not focus on the bottom of my chin where my neck hung down like a chicken. I tried Kybella and CoolSculpting because you go into the medi-spa and they’re like, “Yeah, it’s a couple thousand dollars, but it’s noninvasive.” You think, Well, it’s not invasive; the worst thing that’ll happen is that it doesn’t work. But actually, the worst thing that happens is it disfigures your face.
As I later learned, when you eliminate so much fat from your face, your skin just hangs there. And mine was hanging. So in 2017, at the age of 35, I went under the knife with Dr. Jason Diamond, a Los Angeles-based plastic surgeon, to fix my neck area. We decided on a “minimally invasive necklift” because he said I was too young for a facelift. He essentially went in and kind of sewed the muscle together like a corset and said something to the effect of, “This is going to last you five years, and then at that point, you’ll come back for a facelift.”
The neck surgery went great, but over time, just as the doctor said, the wattle returned. It wasn’t really until I was hosting and producing the music game show Superfan on CBS that I realized how much it was sagging again. This was 2023, and my makeup artist and hairstylist were basically tucking my loose skin into turtlenecks. You can hide a lot with makeup, but this was getting harder, so they would help me out by telling me how to stand and where the best angles were.
It was then I knew it was time to schedule a facelift. I really thought Superfan was going to change my life and I was going to become Ryan Seacrest. So I was like, I better get the facelift before I become the biggest thing since sliced bread.
And yet I felt shame about actually going through with it. I know younger women are getting facelifts and proudly own their decision, but I was 41. I didn’t really know if I was going to tell anyone.
I went through with the surgery and was back to work on camera after two weeks. Everyone was like, “Oh my God, you’re so snatched, you look great, have you lost weight?” That’s the power of choosing the right doctor, because even the way he stitched it—I swear to God, it was like couture. A couture facelift. It was the most delicate facelift I’ve ever seen in my life. It probably helped that I was so young.
