When Helen Mirren speaks, the world pays attention, and in her latest interview… Elle UK is no exception. In the article, the 78-year-old Academy Award-winning actress shares her views on aging, reveals her beauty routine, comments on her pre-teens’ controversial obsession with Sephora, and more. Here are the highlights from the interview:
Regarding aging…
“Obviously, I think the first thing is to get rid of the term ‘anti-aging,’ so it doesn’t exist anymore,” Mirren began. “We get older, there’s no escaping that fact. When you’re 20 years old, you never imagine you’ll be in your 70s, but if you’re lucky, very lucky, you get to experience that, and you realize, ‘Oh, how lucky am I to be at this age and still be able to engage and enjoy the world.’ So it should be ‘pro-aging.’ Let’s change it to ‘pro-aging.'”
As for her skincare routine…
Mirren’s skincare routine is simple, and she seems more interested in the terminology than the products themselves. “I wish there was a different term for my so-called beauty regime, because it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to. look It’s beautiful, but it’s you feel “It feels good,” she says. “So my feel-good routine is always to put on a serum, and all of a sudden my skin feels refreshed. I don’t have a special routine, I just grab whatever is in front of me, but I always put on a moisturizer to wake up my skin.”
About Sephora’s preteen takeover…
Mirren says Sephora’s penetration of the preteen demographic is just a product of fashion. “We all do really stupid things when we’re young,” she explains. “Hopefully there’s nothing in those skincare products that’s actually harmful, but we’ve all done the same thing when we were younger. When I was 14, believe it or not, wearing white lipstick was the trend, so I saved up my pocket money for months to buy this nasty white lipstick. The thing is, they grow up. If we’re lucky, they get older. And they discover a whole new world.”
Regarding beauty standards…
Mirren’s view on beauty standards is that they are always evolving, but never going away. “We’ve always been held to a standard of beauty,” she told the outlet. “For my mother’s generation, it was Greta Garbo and her incredible bone structure. I don’t think anything has changed today, except for the accessibility of social media and the constant comparison culture that it fuels. My mother wanted to look like Greta Garbo, I wanted to look like Twiggy, 16-year-old girls today want to look like Kim Kardashian. Nothing has changed.”
