Katherine Ryan has candidly revealed she underwent a full facelift just eight weeks after welcoming her fourth child – describing the decision as a powerful step to “reclaim my identity” after six pregnancies in five years.
The 42-year-old comedian shared that the £16,000 procedure took place last October, shortly after she gave birth to baby Holland. While she had previously hinted at having cosmetic work done, she has now confirmed the details publicly for the first time on her podcast, Telling Everybody Everything.
“The surgery was a facelift. Yes, a full facelift – a little bit of fat transfer to my cheekbone area, and a small bleph,” she explained. She clarified that a blepharoplasty involves removing a small amount of eyelid skin, often combined with fat transfer to avoid hollowness. “So I had some fat put in my upper face, my eyelids, and then I had a facelift.”
But for Katherine, the transformation wasn’t purely aesthetic. After enduring six pregnancies in five years – including three heartbreaking miscarriages alongside the births of her children with husband Bobby Kootstra – she described the surgery as deeply emotional.
“Almost metaphorically I needed to do something, to reclaim my identity, to reclaim my autonomy, to claw back the face that I had in, like, 2019,” she said. “I am not crazy. I’m not trying to wind it back to 2006. I’m just trying to look the way I did, like, pre-COVID, pre-six pregnancies in five years.”
The surgery was performed by Dr Nick Rhodes at the Coppergate Clinic in York, where full facelifts cost upwards of £16,000. Katherine praised the surgeon’s reputation and experience, saying she had seen his work both in photos and “in the flesh” on people she knows personally.
She also revealed she experienced “zero out of ten pain” after the procedure. “The beauty is you’re pretty numb afterwards,” she said, adding that she was sent home with paracetamol and only needed mild pain relief for a few days. Despite bruising and swelling, she claimed she resumed normal life almost immediately – attending Christmas parties, taking her children to Lapland and even going carolling at the Royal Hall, all while caring for a newborn.
Katherine also admitted the physical toll of repeated pregnancies had affected how she felt within her marriage. “It’s important for my marriage that Bobby and I – we both get to enjoy the kids – I think that we should both have the same amount of physical damage,” she said candidly. “And after all those babies… We did not have the same amount of physical damage. Bobby’s still a hunk, and my face has gotten fat and thin, and fat and thin.”
She said Dr Rhodes advised against a lip lift, telling her it would not suit her face shape – guidance she is grateful for. “Because I followed his guidance… it doesn’t look wild,” she insisted.
Her eldest daughter Violet was initially worried. “She was concerned because she was like, this is going to look horrible. You’re going to come back looking totally different,” Katherine recalled. “And I don’t look different at all. I look a little bit refreshed. My neck is amazing.”
Describing the result as a “super snatched little teensy lollipop neck,” Katherine dismissed the stigma around facelifts and pushed back against the idea they are only for older women or inevitably look unnatural.
“People assume that a facelift always looks botched, or always looks crazy,” she said. “But it’s for anyone who feels like they have lost a lot of skin elasticity, and they want to mend that laxity with surgery.”
She also took aim at celebrities who deny cosmetic procedures. Recalling her strict icing routine post-surgery, she joked: “I thought of some of these celebrities who are around my age who look suspiciously amazing all of a sudden, and they love to say, like, ‘I’ve just been icing my face.’ And I held the ice pack to my jaw. I thought, yeah, I’ve been icing my face too – as part of my recovery from a facelift! These women are having facelifts.”
For Katherine, the message was simple: “If I wanted to lift my face, then the surgery that I needed was a facelift.”
