Lauren Hutton explains why she’s wary of cosmetic procedures

Lauren Hutton signed her massive deal with Revlon over fears that she would age out of the modeling industry.

In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the 78-year-old Nip/Tuck alum — who also posed topless for the magazine — shared that she was inspired by baseball player Catfish Hunter’s insistence on working under a contract when she sought out her lucrative 1973 makeup deal. Hutton’s Revlon deal was the first cosmetics contract of its kind and paid her $250,000 a year, which would be worth more than $1.4 million today.

“I was about to become 30, and I knew I was about to expire, and wanted to protect myself with a contract that would guarantee I kept working for years to come,” she explained. “So I got a contract with Revlon. At the time, it was the biggest one in modeling history.”

More than a decade later, Hutton — who, at the time, had also started acting — was let go by Revlon, having been told by a vice president at the company that women over 40 don’t wear makeup. Hutton, however, kept modeling in her 40s and beyond, and bucked the idea that she had to look youthful in order to be beautiful. In 2017, she became the oldest woman to appear on the cover of Vogue. (In 2020, Judi Dench took that title, posing on the cover of British Vogue at age 85).

“I started shooting with Steven Meisel, and I told him, ‘I’m not going to try and look younger,'” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “And he said, ‘I love that. That’s why I am working with you.'”

While Hutton has her beauty routines, such as adding castor oil to her hair, one thing she’s not interested in is overdoing it with “cosmetic procedures,” calling it a “real thin line you tread.”

“There are people who I find hard to look at today,” she said. “Their faces don’t look like the people I once knew.”

The American Gigolo star has previously spoken out about the desire to look younger. She told People in 2019, “I tried Botox once, and I jumped back when I saw myself because I had an eyebrow that looked like the Wicked Witch. Go figure. I took collagen a few times. I had a movie where I had to look like I was 23 and I was thirtysomething.”

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Instead, she’s chosen to “let go” of the idea that she looks like “a miniature Shar-Pei.”

“The wrinkles are going to be there,” she told the outlet, “and they really are the badges of your life.”

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