Holly Madison has spoken frankly about why she chose cosmetic surgery, sharing the reason she feels “really happy” with how it turned out.
During the Wednesday, June 24 installment of Dear Media’s “Derm Approved” podcast, the 46-year-old former Girls Next Door personality discussed the procedure with host Dr. Shelia Farhang and said she feels confident about the decision. The episode arrived as Madison continues to stay busy with her own podcast, You Wish, as well as her ongoing media appearances and true-crime projects.
“I’ve had a lower facelift on my jawline,” Madison said. “I’m really happy I got it done.”
Madison, who shares two children with former husband Pasquale Rotella, explained that changes to her face after pregnancy led her to seek a solution for jowling and extra fullness in her lower face. She said she had tried to address the issue with noninvasive options first, but ultimately decided surgery would give her the result she wanted.
“A little bit of lipo under my chin. I just felt like after having kids, you know, I gained a lot of weight with my pregnancy and there was just nothing I could do,” she explained. “There were no lasers or anything that could really do what I wanted it to do so I found somebody whose before and afters I really loved.”
She said recovery meant stepping away from recording her own podcast for roughly two weeks. During that time, she stayed in a hotel in Los Angeles and had a nurse with her.
When it came to planning the work, Madison said she and her surgeon approached it cautiously. Rather than aiming for a dramatic change, she wanted a result that stayed on the subtle side.
“I’d rather have it not go far enough,” she said, “and then I can go back and maybe do more rather than have it go too far and I’m looking like the Joker.”
Farhang agreed with that approach and noted how difficult it can be to reverse an overly aggressive result after surgery.
“It’s so much harder to scale back after you’ve gotten too much, especially when you’re cutting,” she said.
Madison also acknowledged that the scars sit just in front of her ears, but said she has no issue being open about them.
“If you look close, you can totally see it, but I don’t care,” she said. “I’m kind of open about it. I already talked about it on my podcast.”
She has not avoided the subject of cosmetic treatments in general, and has previously discussed the upkeep she still chooses, including Botox, IPL laser treatments and CO2 laser work under her eyes. Madison has also said in recent interviews that she prefers being open about what she does, rather than pretending she has done nothing at all.
The best-selling writer has also talked before about wanting to avoid passing harmful appearance pressures on to her children. She said she feels reassured by how unimpressed they are by many beauty routines.
“I’m very relieved because my daughter and my son both roast me for dyeing my hair, they roast me for having extensions. They roast me when I wear a lot of makeup, so I think I’m good,” Madison told PEOPLE in November 2023. “Knock on wood, I think they’re not going to fall into the trap of trying to make themselves look over-processed or trying too hard for the beauty standard because they are over it.”