Who would have thought that ’90s bombshell Pamela Anderson would someday became the face of all-natural beauty? Though she spent the bulk of her career heavily shellacked in product, the Baywatch star found, in her 50s, a liberation in going makeup-free, and her bare-faced appearances and posts are a welcome breath of fresh air in the age of filler and filters.
In August 2023 she shared that her no-makeup era was inspired, in part, by the death of her longtime makeup artist Alexis Vogel in 2019. “She was the best,” Anderson said of Vogel. “And since then, I just felt, without Alexis, it’s just better for me not to wear makeup.
“I think we all start looking a little funny when we get older,” she added. “And I’m kind of laughing at myself when I look at the mirror. I go, ‘Wow, this is really…what’s happening to me?’ It’s a journey.”
But there’s a difference between ditching the allover glam and going literally bare-faced to a fashion event. Of her natural-beauty moment at Paris Fashion Week in October 2023, Anderson later reflected, “Something just kind of came over me and I was dressing in these beautiful clothes and I thought, I don’t want to compete with the clothes,” she explained in her newsletter. “I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room. I feel like it’s just freedom. It’s a release.”
She later told Allure that the decision to go makeup free was something she did for herself, not a stunt. “It wasn’t to make a political statement, I just wanted to have my little weird face sticking out of the top of those great clothes,” she said. “And the funny thing was I would come back from the shows wearing all these clothes and a big funny hat and everything and there were all these paparazzi and then I went in one door and changed into my jeans and T-shirt and no makeup and walked out the door right through the same crowd that had been chasing me and no one noticed.”
She also revealed what she does do to her face, and it’s a pretty healthy regimen. “My beauty ‘routine’ is pretty simple these days,” Anderson shared. Having “weeded out” products that are “too complicated,” she is no longer “hovering over the sink with multiple steps” to do skin care. She has just a few products and shared, “I plant things where I’ll see them and [apply them]…. A rose hydration spray in the fridge that I use every time I open it…a lip balm in my bag that I apply all day long, especially in the winter.”
Pamela Anderson also uses a homemade rose hip facial oil that she says she applies whether she’s using cosmetics that day or not: It “sits on my vanity for before makeup or just ‘as my makeup’ these days.”
Here’s every time she’s skipped the cosmetics aisle:
