Pamela Anderson: ‘Being vulnerable is more exciting than rock and roll’

It’s an achingly bright August day in Copenhagen and the Danish capital’s cobblestone streets and colourful buildings are brimming with people from all around the world in town for fashion week. Pamela Anderson – actor, model and global beauty icon – is in her hotel room wearing a pale maxi slip dress, barefoot, with little-to-no make-up. She is softly spoken, friendly, fascinating and completely glowing from within – everything you might expect from her.

By far one of the most memorable beauty icons of all time, Anderson made a splash at the Vivienne Westwood show last year, when she opted to go make-up-free. Her decision to take control of own image and become her own kind of beauty icon is incredibly important in a social media vortex world. With her new take on beauty, she’s also using jewellery as a way to express herself. 

Anderson is in Copenhagen with Pandora, which happens to be based there. Earlier this year, she was named Pandora’s global brand ambassador for lab-grown diamonds and marked the occasion by wearing nearly 200 carats of pink lab-grown stones (cut and polished with 100 per cent renewable energy and set in 100 per cent recycled silver or gold) at The Met Gala. “I always felt a little bit self-conscious, wearing jewellery,” she says. “And now I feel like it kind of works with what I’m doing as I’m slowly rebuilding how I see myself and my style.”

In Copenhagen, Anderson attended Pandora’s celebratory dinner at Væksthus and sat front row with her sons at the Rotate show where the jewellery artist Grete Henriette repurposed 2,000 Pandora bracelets to create a fringed dress that swayed down the runway. “We really align philosophically with the sustainability aspect and the accessibility, which is really important to me,” says Anderson of the partnership, while wearing Pandora’s launch, the Be Love Heart Charm which is a puffy heart reimagined straight from the 2000 archives. “I’m a real romantic. I just made this little charm bracelet today with all these little cute roses and my kids’ initials and birds and all my favourite things. I remember, my kids used to do this for their girlfriends in school, now I’m doing it. It’s storytelling.”

We sat down with Anderson in Copenhagen to chat make-up, beauty perspectives, wellness routines and more.

You’ve recently become known as an icon for minimalist make-up. What has been your most interesting experience since going make-up-free?

Pamela Anderson: Well, I mean, at Paris Fashion Week, I just said ‘I can’t sit in a make-up chair for three hours. I’m going to the Louvre. I’ve got things to do. I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room. I’m not trying to compete with anybody. I just want to go see the show and see beautiful clothes.’ I kind of felt like this little girl from my hometown in Canada just plopped in Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood. I thought, how lucky am I? I felt like I’m looking at it from a new perspective instead of an entitled perspective. I didn’t expect anyone to even notice.

I was doing it really for myself. And it became that people stop me all the time now and say, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing.’ I really wanted to peel back everything and see who I was, because I’ve had all these kinds of incarnations and characters I’ve been playing my whole life. And who knows if it’s because I’m a survivor of things or how we put on our mask for people. When I did my documentary and I wrote my memoirs, I looked at my whole life and I’m like, ‘Oh geez, it’s so obvious why I’ve been doing this crazy stuff.’ So now let’s just peel it all back and see what’s there, and then slowly build who I want to be now and who I am authentically as a woman.

Where are you at with make-up at the moment?

Pamela Anderson: Today, I don’t travel with a glam team or anything like that. I dress myself, I put my own make-up on and do whatever I’ve done to my hair. Now I’m like, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll do a little lip.’ I feel I’m definitely doing this backwards because I’m just learning how to do my make-up now at 57-years-old. I’ve done all the wild, crazy, kind of even cartoon characters at times, and I felt like this is my time to be just myself and be kind of a canvas. I want to do more films. If you can lump yourself in, you can get yourself into this image. And then people can’t see anything other than that.

I found when I was going to photo shoots, people had pink latex and big wigs and lots of eyelashes. And I thought, I’m not that person. I didn’t think that people saw me that way. When I reflected on my life, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve created a monster.’ So this has been such a vulnerable journey in public. I feel like it’s like open heart surgery in public a little bit. I feel as long as it’s authentic, it’s exciting. I just keep on thinking this is it. This is who I am. And some people like it, some people don’t. It doesn’t matter.

Sometimes, I do look in the mirror when someone shows me a picture and I’m like, ‘Oh no.’ But what is beauty anyway? It’s subjective. And I feel like we put so much pressure on ourselves to look like people that we see in magazines and movies, and I think imperfections are much more interesting. I find it’s more sensual and we’re not auditioning for anybody. We’re good enough the way we are with the imperfections and our little quirks and things like that are what make us interesting. It has taken a couple years to get to this point, and it’s taken a lot of work and journaling and writing my diaries and reading. I got to a point now where I’m completely exposed.

How does it feel being exposed like that? 

Pamela Anderson: Well, it feels different. It’s definitely vulnerable, but it’s authentic. I feel like it’s definitely a bold choice, but I’m glad I did this because I wouldn’t have wanted to be chasing youth or chasing something unattainable or futile. I want to kind of be in the mystery and I’m so in the mystery right now. I don’t know what’s next. I don’t know what’s happening. It’s really exciting. It’s actually much more exciting than rock and roll.

What is your current beauty routine going from wellness to skincare to make-up when you decide you do want to wear make-up?

Pamela Anderson: Well, I do have my skincare line Sonsie, which is my little baby. It’s just a simple serum, moisture mask and lip balm. We’re creating a cleanser right now and tinted lip balms. We’re doing kind of a little bit of a rebrand right now and with the packaging. That was really fun because I’ve never really been a regimented person. And being that I don’t wear make-up that often, I can always put it on all day long.

Do you have any wellness routines? 

Pamela Anderson: Well, I am vegan and I’m very active. That’s what I love about Copenhagen. Everyone’s walking around and on bicycles and in the water, and I’m kind of an outdoorsy girl, and so I eat really well. I’m a big sourdough baker. I’m a big gardener. I think my garden was, for me, for healing myself too. I just kind of went into my rose garden and my vegetable garden and that was a great space. We’re going to do vegetable charms for Pandora next. And sourdough.

”I named my sourdough starter Astrid Warrior Princess Viking” – Pamela Anderson

And a little baguette would be cute.

Pamela Anderson: A little baguette. We could even do the engraving on top of the sourdough. I named my sourdough starter Astrid Warrior Princess Viking.

I love that. You recently also wrote about how you define beauty. Do you still feel the same way? And what does it mean to you?

Pamela Anderson: My definition of beauty changes, but beauty is freedom to be yourself. And I think that’s what I said. What is beauty? I think that’s what we find beautiful. I know beauty comes from within and it sounds cliché, but it’s true. Your passion and excitement and sensuality comes from within. It’s just so you can feel free enough to be who you really are. I think that is the most beautiful and the most interesting at any age. I don’t think it’s ever too late to start over, which I think I kind of did.

Also too, not to judge yourself of all the things that you’ve done. People sometimes get a little, I think even with any kind of activism or veganism, people get very, I dunno, judgmental for ourselves. I think that you just gotta let that go. Everyone just does the best they can. I always told my kids, just keep on putting good things in your pockets. You’re going to need all that. Just keep on doing your best.

Would you say that perspective of yours has changed throughout time?

Pamela Anderson: I think I didn’t think about this so deeply back in the day. I think I was just having a lot of fun with wild people around me. I kind of was dressing and having fun for the people in my life or what was expected of me. And it kind of just took over. And these last few years of when I’ve really just thought about it a lot more, I’ve thought about how to be happy with myself.

I think it’s very intimate to be more bare-faced. Your boyfriend sees you like that in the morning and you’re going to walk out like that. My mom used to say, ‘If you’re pretty, you’re powerful,’ and she used to always say, ‘Take five minutes, comb your hair.’ And I get that too. But I also think that you don’t need to. I’m still figuring it out for myself.

How would you define your personal style right now?

Pamela Anderson: Kind of minimal. I love all the neutral colours. I love James Perse. This is what I have on. I just love really simple clothes. I have a closet full of crazy, but I’ve done it. I think that there’s chapters in your life. But again, I always encourage my kids too: What are your original thoughts? Say something crazy, say something that you’ve never heard anybody else say. Sometimes we take on other people’s thoughts and ideas, so we can be inspired by books and poetry and movies and people. But really digging in and finding out who you are and what you like, and how you like to dress. Like how you like to dress, everything is so interesting.

I’m a different person every day, but I like that.

Pamela Anderson: That’s great. But you know who you are underneath it all. And I think that’s part of it, obviously it takes talent and skill and to be able to adorn ourselves and present ourselves to the world how we want. It takes risk and you need to be brave to put on a certain style of make-up or certain clothes. And it also takes bravery to be just you and walk out the door in a ponytail. But I think people express themselves in different ways. I do it with vegetable baskets that I give to my neighbours with roses and pickles and mustards, and they’re the most beautiful baskets. I think we’re all painting a picture of what we want our lives to be.