Drew Barrymore and Valerie Bertinelli joined Pamela Anderson on her makeup-free journey in a preview for the Oct. 22 episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.
The two women decided to ditch the makeup for the episode, to explore what it means to peel back that layer in the public arena.
"You're the pioneer of what we're certainly doing here today," Barrymore told Anderson.
The Baywatch actress then shared how her makeup-free odyssey came to be. "It was at Paris Fashion Week, and I decided I was just going to a fashion show, I didn't need to compete with anybody. Like, why am I wasting three hours in a makeup chair, when I have these beautiful Vivienne Westwood clothes on?" Anderson said.
"I didn't realize anyone would even notice. Then people started coming up to me and talking to me. I thought, 'Well, this is a great message,' to really peel it back and find out who I was again."
Anderson added that ditching makeup helped her remember who she really was.
"I found I played characters my whole life," she explained. "I was painfully shy as a kid, and doing Playboy for instance was a huge leap of faith for me. I was physically sick doing it, but I didn't want to be shy anymore.
"And then I just thought, this is what my fantasy of what being a model is, or a Playmate is, or a rockstar wife is, or what anything is, I'm going to do it the best. And I'd been playing these characters along the way, and it just hit me a couple years ago, and I was like, just shaking my head going, 'Who am I?'"
As well as going makeup-free, Anderson bought and renovated her grandmother's property in Canada and has been spending time in nature in a bid to reconnect with herself.
"I just started taking it all back and then started peeking out without makeup, and then I started realizing, 'Oh, I feel great!' As me," she told Barrymore and Bertinelli. "And I don't want people to think of me as all those cartoon characters I kind of created out of protection. That's what I think I did it for, looking back."
She concluded, "This is the best time in my life. I feel so empowered and so free, and so excited about life again."
To celebrate Anderson's courage to be herself, at the end of the preview Barrymore rips out her hair extensions and throws them to the ground, sharing that her hair has been thinning as a result of perimenopause. The other two women enthusiastically cheered for the talk show host after her symbolic gesture.
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