Jamie Lee Curtis has spoken candidly about the beauty of ageing and how she wants the word “anti-ageing” to be eliminated entirely.
Curtis discussed how she feels about getting older with Maria Shriver for the Radically Reframing Ageing Summit, presented by Sounds True and Shriver Media, earlier this month.
The actor revealed that she supports “ageing” and “natural beauty,” and hopes that the term “anti-ageing” could cease to exist.
“I am an advocate now for natural beauty because I do feel that there has been a genocide on natural beauty,” she explained. “This word ‘anti-ageing’ has to be struck, because what the f*** is ‘anti-ageing?’”
“I am pro-ageing,” she added. “I want to age with intelligence and grace and dignity and verve and energy. I don’t want to hide from it.”
During the summit, the Halloween star also noted how she doesn’t have any “time to waste” and that she does everything she wants with “zero attachment,” according to Prevention.
“I am 63 years old. My mother died at 76; my father died at 85. I have no effing time to waste,” she said. “My motto is: ‘If not now, when? And, if not me, who?’ And, that has unleashed me and freed me, and allowed me to do everything I’m doing with zero attachment.”
However, Curtis acknowledged that looking in the “mirror” can make it difficult for her to “be in acceptance” of her looks and body, so she “turns [her] back on it”.
“When I get out of the shower, I turn my back on the mirror,” she explained. “I don’t stare at my now 63-year-old body in the mirror, I turn my back at it…I’m trying to live in acceptance. And, if I look in the mirror, it’s harder for me to be in acceptance. I’m more critical.”
According to Curtis, she’s decided to make a few other changes in her life by “stripping away the unessential aspects” of it, which she said included her “hair.”
“I could never figure out what to do with my effing hair. I couldn’t figure it out… so I finally figured it out - cut it off!” she said at the summit. “I have stripped away the things that are not essential to me. I’m not a fashion girl, so I wear basically black or navy blue.”
“I keep my hair short… so I can get done with the quotidian aspects of my life, so I am free to do the creative aspects of my life,” she continued.
Curtis has previously opened up about beauty and ageing on social media. In an Instagram photo shared last February, she shared a photo of herself taken via the front camera of her phone and described it as a “‘gotcha’ moment.”
“Often the most unflattering image, we are often looking down, to remind us of our humility, humanity and lack of hubris in this filtered world we all exist in on this platform,” she wrote in the caption.
Earlier this month, Curtis also described how her body was shown in her new movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, where she stars as IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra. Ahead of the movie’s premiere, she shared a behind-the-scenes photo of her character wearly a bright yellow sweater and showing off her stomach. Curtis noted how, throughout the filming process, her one request “was no concealing of anything” in regards to her appearance.
“I’ve been sucking my stomach in since I was 11, when you start being conscious of boys and bodies, and the jeans are super tight,” she wrote in the caption of an Instagram post.
“I very specifically decided to relinquish and release every muscle I had that I used to clench to hide the reality,” she continued. “That was my goal. I have never felt more free, creatively and physically free.”
The Freaky Friday star also called out the beauty business, referring to it as a “billion-dollar, trillion-dollar industry,” for trying to encourage people to “hide things”.
“Concealers. Body-shapers. Fillers. Procedures. Clothing. Hair accessories. Hair products. Everything to conceal the reality of who we are,” she wrote.
