With nearly 50 years in the entertainment industry, Jamie Lee Curtis knows how to navigate Hollywood beauty standards.
During an appearance on Wednesday’s episode of IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson, the 67-year-old iconic actress opened up about the “fake” Hollywood, explained why she “succumbed” to pressure to look a certain way, and revealed how she was able to discover self-love as she aged.
“Aging happens, and aging happens, and by the way, it comes to all of us,” Curtis said.
“But that’s not what Hollywood is all about,” Obama replied.
“This isn’t just Hollywood,” Curtis says. “It’s technology, it’s social media, it’s filtering. What we used to call airbrushing is now just filtering. It’s all fake.”
“It’s just a hoax. It’s the cosmetic industrial complex. It’s as insidious in many ways as the military-industrial complex is about money. I mean, it’s just about money, right?”
“And that’s the idea of saying to someone, ‘This is going to change you and make you better, and therefore better means you’ll be more loved and more successful.'” So it’s a bullish cycle, but it preys on our fundamental insecurities. For many people, that’s who they are. ”
Curtis, who has been open about her past cosmetic surgeries, said that while she was “never beautiful”, she had learned that all the plastic surgery and fillers would never address the core issue of self-esteem.
“Right now, I’ve never been pretty,” she said. “And I want to say it out loud…I wasn’t that pretty. I wasn’t pretty the way girls are pretty. I was pretty. I can look good. I can look good enough, but that wasn’t my ticket. And that’s very important to me because I wasn’t counting on it.”
“After trying everything, I gave in and I have talked about it many times,” she continued. “I sucked the fat off, I cut the fat off. I tried to do what everyone else does and it just doesn’t work. There are a lot of things that happen.”
“First of all, it doesn’t work because of self-esteem issues,” she added. Because you will eventually look in the mirror and realize that you used something outside of yourself to change something to make you “better.” But you’re still the same person you were before, that doesn’t mean you’re better. ”
“I think it actually makes you feel like you’re deceiving yourself and causes self-loathing,” she said. “And for me, accepting the way I look is part of self-love.”
Curtis also talked about the moment he realized that comparing himself to others went against everything he preached.
“People were comparing themselves to me the same way I was comparing myself to anyone else,” Curtis said.
“I know what it’s like to look at a picture of a beautiful woman and think, ‘I’ll never look like that.'”
In 2002, while promoting her children’s book Fall in Love with Me: Unleashing a Little Self-Esteem, Curtis decided to pose in her underwear for a photoshoot for More magazine, with no filter at all.
“I realized I was a liar,” she said. “Because if I had paid attention to what I wrote[in the children’s book]I wouldn’t have had plastic surgery. I wouldn’t have had liposuction.”
“So I said, you know what? I’m going to take a picture of me in my underwear, with no good light, no makeup, no hair,” she continued.
“I’m going to stand there naturally, and you’re going to take a picture of me, and then you’re going to have me dress up, but you have to print those two pictures side by side, and you have to say how long it took, how much money it cost, how many people were involved.”
“But we still knew what we were selling was a scam,” she added.
