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- Kelly Ripa details her first Botox experience in her new memoir Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories.
- She calls the disappearance of her laugh lines and crow’s feet “like magic.”
- “I find it ironic that the happier a person feels, the older it can make them look,” she writes. “Would I notice these things if I didn’t work on camera every day? Of course not.”
Today, getting Botox is almost a right of passage in Hollywood. But Kelly Ripa didn’t get it—in her face, at least—until she was 38. Her first foray into the experience was actually to treat chronic sweating—or, as she calls it, “pit-tox.” Eventually, though, she was convinced, partly by tabloid rumors criticizing her appearance, that it was time to take aging into her own hands (or those of her doctor’s, rather). In her new memoir, Live Wire: Long-Winded Short Stories, she details the whole process, calling it “magic.”
In the book, Ripa recounts her realization that all of her on-camera peers visited the same renowned doctor, Dr. Brandt, for regular injections, which made her feel like she was the only one actually aging. “No wonder I was so confused about my own aging. I hadn’t seen it done,” she writes. “Since everyone around me was unwilling to talk about what they were having done, I just assumed it was my work schedule plus having three young children that was making me age in dog years compared to my peers.”
When Ripa finally joined the cosmetic procedure club, she compared the post-“Bo” rush to what she imagined using heroine would be like. “I actually saw the difference in Dr. Brandt’s office as the years of sleepless nights from nursing babies and waking up early for work melted away,” she writes. “And like magic the elevens in between my eyebrows vanished before my very eyes. So did my crow’s feet. These were the things that really bothered me about my appearance.”
She continues: “I smile and laugh a lot, which is good emotionally but terrible when it comes to creating laugh lines. I find it ironic that the happier a person feels, the older it can make them look. Would I notice these things if I didn’t work on camera every day? Of course not. I am not as narcissistic as this chapter would indicate.”
Ripa writes that she left the office that day with “a spring in my step,” and a new appreciation for her All My Children co-star, Jennifer Bassey, who had told her to “hop on the Botox train” when she was in her 20s.
“I would always dismiss her, telling her I didn’t understand how or why anyone would deliberately inject botulinum toxin into their face. Then I would arrogantly and ignorantly tell her that there was something to be said for growing old gracefully,” she writes. “Jennifer, ever ready with a clever retort, would respond. ‘Darling, imbeciles grow old gracefully. You’re not an imbecile, are you?’ Not anymore, I thought to myself as I walked home from Dr. Brandt’s with my complementary frozen peas in a latex glove for swelling.”
In her quest to age her own way, Ripa, now 51, also doesn’t plan on going gray anytime soon, even if that’s what’s trending. “I need to dye my hair,” she said in January on Live With Kelly and Ryan in response to celebrities like Andie MacDowell, Jane Fonda, and others letting their gray hair shine. “I think certain people look great with their gray hair. I think it depends on the person. I really do.”
Ripa has always forged her own path, so it doesn’t surprise us that she’s done the same with aging. Live Wire was released September 27, and Ripa’s book tour is ongoing until October 9.
Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer who reports on all things health and nutrition for Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Prevention. Her hobbies include perpetual coffee sipping and pretending to be a Chopped contestant while cooking.
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