When Helen Mirren speaks, the world takes notice—and her latest interview with Elle UK is no exception. In the article, the 78-year-old Academy Award-winning actress shared her insights on aging, shed some light on her daily beauty regimen, and commented on the controversial obsession pre-tweens have with Sephora, among other subjects. Here’s a breakdown of the key points from the interview.
On Aging…
“I think the first thing is to lose the word ‘anti-aging,’ of course, so that it doesn’t exist anymore,” Mirren began. “Because we are going to age, there’s no way out of that fact. When you’re 20, you can’t even imagine that you’ll ever be in your seventies, but it’s only if you’re lucky, very lucky, that you’ll get to experience it. And you realize, ‘I’m so lucky to reach this age and still be able to engage with and enjoy the world.’ So it should be ‘pro aging.’ Let’s change it to ‘pro aging.'”
On Her Skin Care Routine…
Mirren’s skin care routine is simple, and she’s seemingly more concerned with the terminology than the products themselves. “For my so-called beauty regime, I really wish we could find another word for it because it doesn’t necessarily make you look beautiful, but it makes you feel good,” she said. “My feel-good routine, then, is that I always I love applying a serum—you can suddenly feel your skin just freshen up. I don’t have any particular process; I grab whatever’s in front of me but I do always put on a moisturizer to wake up my skin.”
On Sephora’s Pre-Tween Takeover…
The Sephora pre-tween takeover, Mirren says, is just a result of what’s trending. “We all do really silly things when we’re young,” she reasons. “I hope there’s nothing in those skin care products that’s actually going to harm them, but we’ve all done something similar when we were young. When I was 14, believe it or not, it was fashionable to wear white lipstick, so I saved up my pocket money for months to buy this disgusting white lipstick. The point is, they will grow up; they will grow older, if they’re lucky. And then they will discover a whole new world.”
On Beauty Standards…
Mirren’s perspective on beauty standards is that they are always evolving but never disappearing. “We’ve always been held to beauty standards,” she told the outlet. “For my mother’s generation, it was Greta Garbo and her impossibly beautiful bone structure. I don’t think anything’s changed today, aside from the accessibility through social media and constant comparison culture it fuels. My mother wanted to look like Greta Garbo; I wanted to look like Twiggy, and a 16-year-old girl today wants to look like Kim Kardashian. Nothing’s changed.”
