Sarah Jessica Parker always keeps it refreshingly real when it comes to calling out how strange it is that women are expected to look a certain way as they get older (eg, eternally youthful and wrinkle-free) — a standard to which men are rarely held. Now, she’s opening up about why she simply doesn’t want to waste too much mental real estate on turning back time. Instead, she prefers to focus on what makes her feel most like herself, according to a new interview with Bustle.
Sarah Jessica Parker talks about ageing and grey hair
The Hocus Pocus 2 star revealed she’s “not willing to devote a lot of real or psychic time” to making herself appear younger, she said in the interview. Parker also hopes young women know that they have so much more to offer than what they look like, she added. “You want to be the person with the most experience who is a leader or relied upon as a professional, as a friend, as a wife, as a partner. That only comes with time spent living,” explained the 57-year-old. “So why are we not valuing that, instead of being focused on the fact that time spent living also produces wrinkles?”
That said, Parker is “not delusional about the passage of time and the reality of it,” she told Bustle. “It’s not as if it doesn’t penetrate that other people have opinions about ageing and my ageing and the way I look and the way other women look — I’m aware of that,” she said. However, she’d rather talk about what makes her feel most like herself. “When I’m out walking and have nothing to do, or I’m going to a bookstore, or I have some kind of freedom that’s based on choices that I’m getting to make — that’s when I feel most like myself,” she said in the interview.
“How best to feel like yourself is the thing I’ve probably spent more time thinking about than I have beauty or ageing, because there’s just simply not a lot I can do about it,” explained Parker. “I could do more, but I guess I don’t want to,” she added. All the slow claps for that.
Parker’s recent thoughts aren’t too surprising if you’ve been following her recent statements about her hair. Headlines popped up last summer declaring that the actress was “proudly showing off” her natural strands during a lunch date with talk show host Andy Cohen, who has long sported grey hair. “It became months and months of conversation about how brave I am for having grey hair,” said Parker in a recent interview with Allure. “I was like, please, please applaud someone else’s courage on something!”
“Andy has a full head of beautiful grey hair. But no one mentioned him, sitting right next to me,” Parker told Allure, calling out the double standard of beauty women face. And while she admitted that “some of [the chatter] hurts for a minute,” she mostly hopes people can realise how trivial it all really is, added the Sex and the City alum. “It’s just not a great use of time, of ink, of anybody’s attention,” she said in a recent interview. “We all need distractions, to take ourselves away from the headlines that are devastating, unthinkable. But is this the distraction we want? Or do you want to read a book or do a crossword puzzle or talk to a friend? I think we can do better.”
This story first appeared on www.shape.com
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