It seems at least two female stars are speaking out against the pressure put on women to look perfect—and not just in Hollywood, but in everyday life. In separate interviews, actress Salma Hayek and songstress Annie Lennox got candid about the topic, with Lennox making a major move to enact change.
“You still have to be a good wife and mother.
And now you also have to be skinny, and you have to look 20 when you’re 40,” Hayek told The Guardian. “It’s too much. We need to stop with the crazy expectation, give ourselves a break.”PHOTOS: See Salma Hayek Through the Years
Lennox echoed that sentiment in an interview with Bobbi Brown for Yahoo! Beauty, even taking matters into her own hands by asking that her wrinkles not be removed in the picture for the cover of her new album, Nostalgia. “I just wanted to represent myself at my age in a nice way, obviously,” she tells the site. “There’s lights and there’s makeup, and there’s probably a tiny, tiny bit of manipulation here and here. But I said, “Please, I just want to look as I am.”
And as you can see, at age 60, that’s pretty phenomenal.
Still, Lennox doesn’t feel that women need to shun beauty entirely, telling Brown that for a woman her age “less is more.”
“The process of getting older doesn’t have to be submission to becoming frail,” she continues. “But at the same time, we don’t have to feel desperate that we have to be young. It’s not about that either. It’s just about finding the balance within yourself, and having the right kind of attitude and a healthy approach to who you are as a human being, going through the journey of life with gratitude.”
PHOTOS: See Celebs’ Makeup-Free Selfies