Actress, author, activist and fashion muse Pamela Anderson has revealed the sad reason she no longer wears full glam, instead opting for a more stripped back, bare-faced look. After her makeup artist, Alexis Vogel, tragically passed away from breast cancer in 2019, Anderson abandoned her signature beauty vibe; pencilled-in brows, over-lined lips, dark eyeliner, and her iconic up-do.
“She was the best. And since then, I just felt, without Alexis, it’s just better for me not to wear makeup,” Pamela, 56, told Elle in a new interview. “[The new look] is freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious too. Because I did notice that there were all these people doing big makeup looks, and it’s just like me to go against the grain and do the opposite what everyone’s doing.”
“I think we all start looking a little funny when we get older,” she adds. “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.”
In the interview, Pamela remembers her ’90s “wild and uninhibited” aesthetic.
“I don’t know if it was a defense mechanism or what. I just thought, ‘I’m going to have fun,’” she says. “[I’d accessorise] with the makeup from the day before, and a little bit of glitter from two nights before. The stuff that never leaves you! I’d be volunteering at the kids’ school, and I would catch myself in a reflection, and I’d have glitter all over my face. Which doesn’t make you a bad mum, just because you’re covered in glitter.”
In March 2023, Pamela opened the Spring/Summer 2023 BOSS show in Miami and was markedly toned down; fresh skin, tousled bun, a smidge of a smoky eye. A month prior she starred makeup-free on the front cover of WWD.
“I really feel powerful right now when everything’s very pared down,” Pamela told the publication. “I like to see my freckles. I like when my hair isn’t done. I like just a really fresh face. I don’t like those injections, and that doesn’t work on me. I want to see what’s going to happen.”
We can just picture her waking up at her secluded lake-side home in Vancouver, lighting her fire and sitting down to journal, makeup free. (This is actually how she spends her mornings. If you haven’t signed up to her weekly newsletter, you can here.) Bliss.
