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 own 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 because 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 not 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.
