Gwyneth Paltrow Opens Up About Aging and What Happens When You're Not Considered 'Beautiful'
Gwyneth Paltrow is not ashamed of aging.
During the most recent episode of Goop‘s podcast, The Beauty Closet, the founder of the lifestyle brand, 46, opened up about getting older in the spotlight and how she’s responded to her changing appearance.
As she spoke to hosts Jean Godfrey-June and Megan O’Neill, Paltrow admitted that she hasn’t always felt confident about her looks through the years, but said that she’s been able to adapt to the changes over time and embrace herself more with age.
“I’ve always felt so funny about my looks,” Paltrow admitted about the aging process. “I think that it’s very rare to think that you’re a beautiful person, and so, I feel like every other woman — like, I don’t see that when I look in the mirror.”
“I think for me it’s more internally feeling,” she continued. “You know, as I go on in life and I feel more and more myself and less judgmental about myself, my values become clearer to me. I can be in integrity all the time, which was much harder when you’re a younger woman and you’re trying to please and juggling all this stuff.”
RELATED: Gwyneth Paltrow Reveals Her Surprising Beauty Secrets, From Supplements — to Sex!
Paltrow went on to explain how she also has this “other added bizarre layer” as a woman where she sometimes feels like she’s being “cast as something and put in a box.”
“It’s a weird thing to be — I don’t mean in a pejorative way objectified,” she explained. “I think when you come to age, if you have this broad identity as that, what does it mean to get wrinkles and, like, get closer to menopause, and all these things?”
“What happens to your identity as a woman if you’re not f—able and beautiful?” she asked.
Despite the physical changes that aren’t always well received, Paltrow said the aging process is overall a beautiful thing because of how one’s inner beauty begins to shine with time.
“Luckily, what’s happening at the same time in parallel is you just start to like yourself,” she shared on the podcast. “I think you get to a point where it’s almost like your sort of pulchritude is waning in a way and your inner beauty is, like, really coming out, and so it’s this funny shift that’s happening.”
“It’s like, you feel so good, you know who you are, hopefully, you value the relationships in your life and your work and your contribution to the world,” she added, before joking, “But then you’re like, ‘Wow, I have crow’s feet. Damn!'”
Paltrow previously opened up to PEOPLE about the pressures of aging in the spotlight and revealed how she wasn’t phased by any tell-tale signs of getting older.
“Of course I have wrinkles [and] gray hair. But I genuinely love it. This is who I am,” she told PEOPLE in Dec. 2016. “I have been through incredible ups and downs and I feel so blessed that I have the wrinkles to tell the story.”
At the time, the actress — who declared herself “a mess” in her 20s — said she felt confident about being a “grown woman,” in part by “just accepting where you are in time and space.”
“I feel good about [it]. I think it’s incredibly sexy … And I wouldn’t want to erase years off my face or to travel back in time for anything,” she shared, adding that she credits her happiness to the confidence that comes with simply growing older.
“I really believe that when a woman turns 40, she gets a software upgrade,” the star said. “I have never been happier.”
