Kelly Ripa Explains Why She Had to Get Her Earlobes Surgically Fixed: 'I Had Hanging Gauges'

Kelly Ripa recently revealed in a new behind-the-scenes video that she went under the knife — and it was for a rather unexpected procedure.

During the Live with Kelly and Ryan! host’s latest Fashion Finder segment on Instagram TV, the 49-year-old explained why she visited a plastic surgeon to address an issue with her earlobes.

“I had gauges, like hanging gauges,” Ripa says in the video, wearing a bright floral-print Erdem dress and diamond stud earrings.

“See these holes up here,” she continues, pointing to where her diamond studs sit. “These were my earholes that tore all the way through. So I had to go to a plastic surgeon.”

“There’s a piece of my earlobe that’s not there because he had to sew it together,” she shares.

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Ripa, who has four piercings on her left ear and three on her right ear, says she developed those “gauges” due to wearing hanging earrings, which tore through her lobes over time. “This one really recovered very nicely. This one is perfect,” she adds about her left ear. “[The right one] was just way worse. The damage was worse.”

The mother-of-three also revealed that she pierced her own ears back in the day. “A needle and an apple,” one person in her dressing room says. Ripa adds, “Me too. Mine are crooked because half of these are self-pierced.”

Luckily, Ripa’s reconstructive surgery allows her to still wear sparkly ear candy. On Sunday, the TV show host wore diamond drop earrings on the red carpet while twinning with her 18-year-old daughter, Lola Grace.

The mother-daughter-duo matched in chic high-neck mini dresses, with Ripa wearing a sparkly Balmain dress with black embellished heels and Lola wearing a navy silk dress from Reformation, teamed with a drop necklace and white Off-White heeled booties with its signature “For Walking” written on the side.

Lola, a freshman studying music at New York University, has worn her Reformation mini dress before, most recently for her family’s Thanksgiving celebration two weeks ago.

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“#thankful for this #blackfriday #thanksgiving photo. Better late than never. 🦃🦃🦃🦃🦃,” Ripa wrote alongside a family photo from Thanksgiving.

In the picture, Lola is accompanied by her mother, Ripa, her father and actor, Mark Consuelos, 48, and her two brothers, Michael Joseph, 22, and Joaquin Antonio, 16.

Earlier this month, Ripa told guest co-host Anderson Cooper that Lola has been thoroughly enjoying her college experience thus far. “She loves it, she loves it,” she explains. “When she was a little girl, like, 3 years old, she used to play dorm room in her bedroom. First she played sleep away camp, then she played dorm room,” Ripa added. “So this is like a girl who was meant to live away from us. She was born to live outside of the house!”