Courtney Love turns 62 today, a number that doesn’t quite square up with how permanently she’s lodged into the collective pop culture. She still reads, somehow, like the one to watch—with a little of her trademark wildcard woven in—not someone who’s already spent decades earning that reputation.
That staying power started with Hole, the band she founded and fronted, and its raw, riot-grrrl-adjacent breakout, Live Through This, released in 1994—just months after the death of her husband, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, a loss that permanently entangled her public identity with one of the most mythologized bands in rock history. It made her one of the most photographed and scrutinized women of the decade, her look picked apart in tabloids as relentlessly as her music was reviewed. She then made a genuine pivot into acting, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her performance opposite Woody Harrelson in 1996’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, followed by roles in Man on the Moon and 200 Cigarettes.
Regardless of the industry, few public figures have had their face and body dissected for this long by so many competing narratives. And Love has responded to all of it with a candor only she could. Her take on beauty isn’t the standard celebrity line of “I don’t do anything”—it has always been more self-aware, and worth revisiting.
On Skin Care
Love previously shared that she stayed loyal to the same handful of products for years, according to a 2013 interview with Into The Gloss. She credited Uma Thurman with introducing her to Vita-A-Kombi 2 by Karin Herzog ($52), which became a mainstay of her routine, and said she was previously devoted to SK-II, specifically the brand’s Cellumination Cream.
For masking, she pointed to Bioxidea’s Miracle 24 ($104), which she said “dissolves into the skin” after about 20 minutes. At the time, she shared that she liked to layer Kate Somerville’s Quench and a Revive cream on top of the Vita-A-Kombi 2, and has also used products from Colbert MD, Dr. Brandt and Sensai by Kanebo. To remove makeup, she told the outlet, she reached for Eve Lom’s Cleanser ($85). On her habits generally, Love said she’s “pretty loyal” once she finds something that works and doesn’t like to switch products out.
On Fragrance
Fragrance-wise, she’s described herself as a “Fracas girl,” wearing the classic Robert Piguet scent ($215) since she was young without much deviation, although she’s also amassed nearly every Kilian fragrance and a number of Amouage scents along the way, per the same Into The Gloss interview.
On Surgery and Aging
Where Love gets more interesting is on the subject of surgery and aging. She’s been open about having had rhinoplasty early in her career—well before Live Through This made her a household name—once explaining her reasoning bluntly: “That schnoz was not taking me anywhere but radio.”
She’s also referenced having had facelifts, a shift that coincided with her transition from rock frontwoman to leading lady, and said she’s been drawn to non-surgical advances like the stem cell facelift for maintaining a more youthful look over time.
But in a widely cited Harper’s Bazaar interview, Love pushed back on the idea that more intervention is always better, telling the outlet: “There are a lot of wonderful actresses who are getting older and look fantastic…to me, aging gracefully is to let it happen and accept.”
She continued, “In my experience, fighting it always seems to backfire and make people look ridiculous. You see actresses get work done and it makes them unrecognizable.” More recently, she’s said she wants to stay "natural going forward.”
It’s a beauty philosophy that doesn’t resolve into a tidy soundbite—Love has had work done, smartly warns against overdoing it and still makes a case for championing aging. That openness, stated as plainly as she states most things on record, tracks with a career built on refusing to soften her edges, whether she was fronting Hole in the ’90s or holding her own against Woody Harrelson on screen. It’s also arguably more useful than a straight product list. Happy birthday, Courtney.
