When Samantha Jones declared “I’m forty f***ing five. I have nothing to hide,” in Season 6 of Sex and the City, Kim Cattrall delivered a line for the ages. More than 20 years later, Cattrall herself has been just as unbothered about aging in real life. As she celebrates her 70th birthday, the actress’s decades of beauty and wellness interviews add up to a clear philosophy: doing what she wants, on her own terms. Here are the habits, rituals and hard-won lessons the forever icon has shared along the way.
SPF is the whole routine, basically.
Ask Cattrall for her number-one rule and she doesn’t hesitate: “Sun protection! Sun protection! Sun protection!” she told us in a 2023 interview. It’s not just a two-word sound bite—in a second NewBeauty interview, she explained the logic: “It became more about protecting myself—sun protection in particular, since my mom was diagnosed with skin cancer. It was more about taking care and being more aware and doing personal things that when I was younger, I just didn’t take time for. I think that’s where patience comes in. ”
Her holy grail cleanser costs about a dollar.
No 12-step routine here. Asked about her go-to products in that same NewBeauty interview, Cattrall named a decades-old drugstore staple: Dove Bar Soap for Sensitive Skin ($2).
She keeps the rest of her skin care simple, too.
“My beauty regime consists mostly of moisturizer,” Cattrall told Woman & Home. With sensitive skin, she said she’s not interested in a crowded shelf of actives—just consistency, hydration and letting her skin, in her words, “breathe.”
Movement is a must, but it doesn’t need to be extreme.
“I work out every other day. I try to do cardio three or four times a week,” she told Woman & Home—alongside a lighter, low-pressure approach to food: “I joke that I’ve been on a diet since 1974, which is basically true. I can eat that today, but tomorrow I’m not going to.”
Self-care, for her, is refreshingly low-key.
Asked how she unwinds, Cattrall’s answer to NewBeauty was three simple things: “A cool shower. A cup of tea. A good book.” She’s also spoken about the restorative power of a good walk, specifically around the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park: “It’s open all year and beautiful.”
She’s open about injectables—with one condition.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Cattrall discussed trying fillers and Botox without apology. “I’m all about battling aging in every way I can,” she said, adding there are “so many different things you can investigate and try and see if it’s for you.” Her caveat: It has to be done by the right person. “If you have the money and, more importantly, the right surgeon—it can’t be emphasized enough. You want to look like you.”
She doesn’t separate the beauty work from the career.
In that same Sunday Times conversation, Cattrall framed upkeep as professional as much as personal: “It’s not just a vanity thing,” she said. “I play a certain kind of woman who looks a certain kind of way. And professionally, I am looking after myself.”
Her real secret might be her attitude about getting older in the first place.
Cattrall has been candid that aging in Hollywood came with real outside challenges. In an interview with People, she said: “In my 50s, I felt things slipping away,” describing scripts that got thinner and roles that narrowed to “an ingenue or a leading lady and then a divorced wife or a cougar. And I’m none of those things.”
Rather than shrink to fit the categories offered to her, she said she’s chosen to keep asking a bigger question instead: “The biggest mystery of life is what now?” She’s echoed that same realism in an interview with Grazia UK, pushing back on unrealistic expectations of stars her age: “People expect you to [look] 20, 30 years younger? That’s not possible, even with all the potions and procedures and lasers and regimes and diets. It’s unrealistic.”
Her summary of the decades, from that same conversation: “I’ve been celebrated, I’ve been decimated, I’ve been befriended, I’ve been betrayed. Along the way, you try to find peace within.”
