Reese Witherspoon has basically grown up in front of the world. She starred in her first film—the wonderful Man in the Moon—in 1991, when she was just 14 years old. Now, at 43, she’s not only a successful actress but an acclaimed producer who’s helping shepherd interesting stories about all different kinds of women through the Hollywood machine.
Even though she works in an industry that has long been focused on women’s looks—and struggled to know what to do with them as they get (gasp!) older—she’s not afraid of aging. In fact, she’s proud of the physical signs of getting older. “I have a point of view because I’ve been on this planet for 43 years, and I didn’t feel that same way when I was 25,” she says in a new interview with Allure. “I didn’t have the same things to say. I’m 43 and I’ve had a whole bunch of experiences, and I can speak with a thoughtfulness about the changes I’d like to see in the world, and…I just feel like I earned that gray hair and my fine lines. I like ’em. I so prefer 43 to 25.” As a fellow 43-year-old woman myself, I very much agree with everything Witherspoon says here.
But she also gets those grays touched up by her longtime colorist, Lorri Goddard, and that’s OK too. “It takes three hours to have my highlights done, no joke. I go every seven or eight weeks,” she said. “I’m starting to get gray around the edges of my hairline. Lorri doesn’t like to call them grays, though. She says they’re ‘hyper-blonds.'”
Obviously, Witherspoon has looked fabulous at every age, but she does have some beauty regrets from the nineties—including dark brown lipstick, which she wore to get her driver’s license at 16, and ultra-thin eyebrows. “In the nineties, we plucked our brows really thin. I said ‘we’…at least I did. And it just looked awful. Thank God they grew back, but, I mean, who knows what they might look like now if I hadn’t plucked them into oblivion!”
