Salma Hayek graces Lucky magazine’s May 2020 cover. In the accompanying interview, the 45-year-old Mexican actress opens up about a fashion essential she calls Plan B, her theories about Botox, her friend Demi Moore, but also about her struggles with acne.
Hayek moved to Paris three years ago, when she married François-Henri Pinault, CEO and chairman of PPR. The two have a four-year-old, Valentina. Speaking about this amazing city, Salma says that, “It’s Paris. Everywhere you turn, every corner, every flower, every street lamp — someone has looked, and taken a breath, and used their imagination to make something beautiful.”
“It’s nuts, how good the people look, too,” she continues. “Nobody’s overweight, everybody’s well dressed, no tennis shoes — somehow, even though they walk all over the place, everyone manages to wear real shoes, nice shoes.”
Next, pointing at her low ponytail, she told Lucky that, “This is very Parisian. My husband, it’s funny, but he hates it when I have this Parisian hair! He loves my crazy-maniac-madwoman just-got-out-of-the-shower hair. He is like the lawyer for my thick, wild, natural hair. He’s like, ‘Why make it suffer?’ But you know for 45 years I’ve got this big hair, and these big boobs, and I’m this tiny person and sometimes — you just want to be … smaller.” Then, she adds, “He’s probably right — my mom always said, ‘You think you know better than God?’”
When it comes to her skin, Salma confesses she struggled a lot with acne. “My skin?! When I was 25 and I left being a soap opera star in Mexico to go try to be a movie star in Hollywood and all of Mexico was laughing at me? And I could barely get work as an extra? You want to talk about bad skin? I had acne. And this acne was so bad, it sent me into a severe, severe depression. Like I couldn’t leave the house. I’d wake up in the morning and lie there and touch my face before I got up, just to prepare myself to look in the mirror,” she says.
And the actress admits that this problem took her to depression. “The next stage with that sort of depression is food: too little, or too much. Guess what I did? I mean, I was fat and broken out, I couldn’t leave the house and I couldn’t pay the rent,” Hayek reveals.
Salma told Lucky magazine that a friend saved her. “Alfonso Cuarón—amazing director — he came to the house. He did not play it down, he did not try to say, Oh you look fine. He said you can’t do this to yourself and taught me to meditate, relax. I got myself back together,” the actress says. Then, she also went on Accutane. “I didn’t want to, but it cured it. Since then my skin’s forever sensitive and dry,” Hayek explains.
On her beauty line, Nuance, Hayek says that, “Somewhere my grandmother is smiling. She believed in gentle things, so my serum has royal jelly, my cream has lavender. I’m especially proud of tepezcohuite, which they treat burn victims with in Mexico — I brought it to the chemists, who’d never seen it; that’s when you know you’ve got something new.”
What about Botox? What does Salma Hayek think about this? “Botox, trust me I’ve been tempted — but I resist! Think about what happens to your muscles — and your skin — if you’re sick and don’t move for a few days. It all atrophies! Plus, if you freeze a muscle in your face, other muscles have to compensate! And once you stop, what does that look like,” the actress explains.
Speaking about eating, the actress says that, “I like to eat. I’m always on the edge of how much can I eat without looking too — you know. If I eat something salty, it makes me want something sweet. I eat something sweet, then I want salty. And exercise is not my thing, though I do it. Not like Demi [Moore, her close friend]. She’s so disciplined, I wish I could be like that.”
Hayek does something called Cooler Cleanse, involving fruit and vegetable juices. “But if you starve fat cells too much, your organs have to pay for it, starting with your skin, and it ages faster. Me, I have the other trouble,” she says. Because of this supposed trouble, she leaves little to chance. “What you need is one black dress I call Plan B. It doesn’t have to be fabulous, it just looks good, covers up the problems and is neutral enough for dinner, business, a date, a funeral. You don’t overwear it, you don’t overwash it, because the Plan B is — gold,” Salma says.
Read Salma Hayek’s full interview in the May 2020 issue of Lucky Magazine.