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After years of what she describes to me as “playing dress up,” actor and activist Pamela Anderson isn’t interested in putting on a front for the world any longer. “For years, I was acting like these characters: a Playmate, a rockstar’s wife,” she says. “I love that I went through all of it and did all of those things, but I’m also glad I’ve made it to this point and can laugh at it.”
This newfound comfort recently manifested itself at Paris Fashion Week, where Anderson sat front row at The Row, Vivienne Westwood, and Victoria Beckham. While her body was styled to a T, she only wore a single thing on her face: homemade rosehip oil from her garden.
“I know I wasn’t making strides toward world peace, but I was making a statement,” Anderson told me over Zoom from her Vancouver Island home. “I just thought, ‘I’m doing this for all the girls out there.’ I’ve had stepdaughters in past relationships and my sons have girlfriends, and this was for them. In this day and age, do we even know what a face looks like anymore? This is it.”
Anderson also wants to be clear: She’s not opposed to wearing makeup, she just simply “wasn’t in the mood to play the game” that first day she went bare faced in Paris. “Once I put the clothing on, I thought, ‘I’d rather go for a walk and look at the architecture of Paris rather than sit in the makeup chair for three hours.’” So she leaned into that feeling and skipped out on her glam team. Next thing she knew, she was standing in front of the street style photographers, totally makeup-free.
“I felt a bit insecure once I remembered digital photography,” she says with a laugh. “It felt a bit like jumping off a bridge, but I just smiled. And when I got home from the show, that’s when I decided I wanted to go makeup free the entire week.”
Feeling like this has been a long time in the making. Since she moved back to her hometown in 2019, she’s been on a mission to “get in touch again with the person I was before I left for California [in 1990].”
This is the Pamela I saw through my Zoom screen: Tousled blonde hair (her mother taught her how to dye it before her first Playboy shoot, and she still uses that technique to this day), a smattering of freckles across her nose that a dog named Lucky came to kiss halfway through our call, and her signature lips and brows that she’s been known for her entire career. But I felt like I was talking to a best friend’s mom who had known me my entire life and has a voice that feels like a hug.
“My dogs love me like this, my garden loves me like this,” she says as we continue to talk about the makeup-free risk she took and how it has started a larger conversation about beauty. “Taking those chances are what makes life interesting. And if you have an open heart and you are being vulnerable, you can’t lose. This experience proved to me that people resonate with authenticity and with courage.”
Listen to Vogue editors talk about going makeup-free and more beauty and wellness routines on this episode of The Run-Through here.