Joey King's Face Looked Different at the Met Gala. Here's What She Actually Did.

Joey King walked the 2026 Met Gala carpet, turned back over her shoulder for the cameras, and by the next morning was trending for a reason that had nothing to do with the dress. Commenters across social media were convinced her face looked different — tighter, smoother, subtly altered. The word "facelift" started showing up in the replies almost immediately.

King, who is currently promoting "Practical Magic 2," didn't let it sit for long. Talking on the "In Your Dreams" podcast with Owen Thiele, she addressed the rumors directly. "I didn't get a facelift," she said. "I'm glad we're talking about this."

According to King, the changes people were reacting to came from a stack of temporary, unglamorous decisions rather than a surgeon's table. She got a spray tan. She did a lymphatic massage and a facial the day before the event, then another lymphatic massage on the day itself. And she did a 36-hour fast — one that, by her own account, started out as something much shorter.

King explained the fast wasn't originally planned to run that long. She said it began after a bachelorette party where she'd been drinking and woke up feeling swollen, intending only a brief reset before the Gala — it stretched into a day and a half. She was careful to separate the anecdote from an endorsement: she does not promote prolonged fasting as a routine, she said, describing this specific instance rather than a habit.

Rather than getting defensive about it, King leaned into the absurdity of how quickly a spray tan and a 36-hour fast turned into a facelift rumor. "Everybody thought I had plastic surgery, but I didn't," she said, laughing it off on the podcast rather than treating it as an accusation to fight.

The rumor cycle around King's appearance follows a familiar shape: a red carpet photo, a side-by-side comparison, and a wave of confident diagnoses from people who weren't in the room. What made this one different is that King answered it herself, on her own terms, days later — walking through exactly what she did do, rather than simply denying what she didn't.