In the late ’80s, Paulina Porizkova appeared on runways for the likes of Versace and Calvin Klein and was the Estée Lauder face with the highest-paying modeling contract. Fronting fragrance campaigns for the brand felt like a job for her back then, but now, at 59 years old, Porizkova is returning as an ambassador — this time to talk about aging.
Though she navigated adulthood as a model facing pressures to always look perfect, she’s committed to debunking all of the aging myths around beauty. Sometimes, you’ll see her on Instagram prepping for a fashion show with eye patches and a neck-lift mask, and other times, she’s barefaced, with her sandy gray hair pulled back, doing makeup tutorials and giving tips for older skin. One thing you won’t see her doing is scheduling Botox appointments for her wrinkles; instead, she’s embracing at them as a “map of age,” and she wants other women to do so, too.
“We’re so terrified of wrinkles because, I suppose, wrinkles make us no longer relevant, no longer sexy, no longer desirable, and as women that has been sort of our calling card. It tags along with us for such a long time,” Porizkova said. With her return to Estée Lauder, she plans to amplify this mission and shift beauty standards for aging women. On the Today show, she shared that the top-two skin concerns people go to dermatologists with are acne and wrinkles, concerns she feels are incomparable. “Acne is a [skin] disease, and wrinkles are the signs of privilege that you’re alive. Why eliminate them?” Porizkova said.
The anti-ageism activist is two months away from turning 60 and has never been so excited about a birthday, “I’ve paid my dues,” she said. Now, she wants to pour into Gen-X and millennial women — not only to convince them to use Estée Lauder’s cult-classic Advanced Night Repair Serum to take care of their aging skin instead of tightening their faces but also to prove to society that just because a woman is aging, it doesn’t mean to count her out. And that is relevant.