What beauty rules do you swear by?
RD: My top rules are drinking water, getting good sleep, and exercise.
What’s one beauty rule you think is bullshit?
RD: Anything that has to do with beauty that’s a requirement is B.S. I love those old-school movies where you see the women who got these hair things all set up, and they’ll wake up and do their makeup. I once read that Burt Reynolds’ wife said something like, “He’s never seen me without makeup! I wake up and put makeup on.” So those kinds of things, like you can never leave the house without makeup—I’m not for that.
What’s your holy grail beauty product right now?
RD: I like a gel face mask. That’s my new favorite thing.
Also, I’m allergic to flowers most of the time, so I don’t normally have them around. But I’m really into essential oils, like lavender or citrus or eucalyptus. They’re just so good. I use them really when I have allergies—I just breathe them in and don’t have to take medication as often.
Screw, marry, kill: Lipstick, mascara, and highlighter.
RD: Kill highlighter, because who needs that? Screw lipstick. Marry mascara. Mascara is everything.
Fill in the blank: I love my hair….
RD: I love my hair up. I love my hair wet. I love my hair styled. I love my hair messy. I love my hair tousled. I particularly love it sun-kissed and sea-salt-sprayed.
What’s one beauty perception you’d like to change?
RD: One thing that’s coming up quite often now, which I think is really great, is this pushback on all of the photo airbrushing. I’m going to be 40 this year. It makes sense that I’m going to have wrinkles. They’ve airbrushed scars and stretch marks and all kinds of things out over the years that make it look impossible. I’m starting to look at photos, and I get body dysmorphia looking at my own pictures. Technically, I supposedly look like that, but I don’t. [I’ll look and think,] I don’t have that waist. It’s making it seem like something’s wrong with you. But if you don’t have that, why correct it?
You have $20 and free roam of a drugstore. What would you buy?
RD: I’ll probably get a coconut water and some kind of face spray that’s hydrating. And then a balm of some kind that’s also like a facial moisturizer, but also like a lotion, because I travel a lot.
What was the last Instagram rabbit hole you went down?
RD: Nathan Pyle! I’m obsessed with Nathan Pyle. He does these really cute alien cartoons. Someone sent me one, and then I ended up following his account.
What’s your go-to getting ready music?
RD: I have lots of different music; I’m a big music person. I like listening to records. I just discovered Noizu, who I really like. I love dance music. I love everything from disco to flapper twenties music. My daughter will be like, “Why are we listening to this?” But I get into it and I’m like [snaps] “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”
And normally I wouldn’t talk about my boyfriend on purpose, but he does do something that’s really sweet. I don’t always listen to music in the morning, but I’ve started to now because we’re separate often and he sends me a song every morning that we don’t wake up together. So we’ve got like dozens and dozens and dozens of songs. So I keep waiting—there are moments where he has a super big day and I’m expecting that he’s not going to send me a song, and yet he still sends me a song every morning. It’s the first thing he gets up and does before he has to do anything. It’s great because it’s not only like, Oh, I love this song, but oftentimes it’s the lyrics behind it or something we were talking about. I just noticed that it’s made music part of my mornings, which it hadn’t been for a long time. So I’ve been really enjoying that.