The Next Time You’re at the Airport, You Might See Sophia Bush Yelling at People
Sophia Bush (Photo: Courtesy of EcoTools)
If you ever find yourself in the TSA line at the airport in front of Sophia Bush, don’t even think about abandoning that bin at the end of the security belt.
“Never am I on the level of Brooke Davis sass more than when I’m in a TSA line and six guys go through ahead of me and just leave the bins on the [belt],” the 33-year-old actress tells Yahoo Celebrity, referring to her One Tree Hill character, whom she played for all nine seasons of the CW series. “I literally will look up and yell, ‘Oh, it’s cool. I’ll put these away for you. Don’t worry about it. TSA lady is not your maid!’ I call people out. I get so mad! Their job is not to pick up this tray and put it at the end of the conveyor belt for you, lazy traveler. Their job is to look for bombs!”
But her do-gooding doesn’t stop with airport employees, as Bush is a staunch advocate for women’s education and female positivity in general. The Chicago P.D. star recently teamed up with the Girl Project and beauty brand EcoTools to ignite a social conversation around women’s empowerment through the #MyTrueBeauty campaign.
Photo: Courtesy of EcoTools
“The reason I signed on to the Girl Project is because it gets a little tricky trying to decide ‘Do I want to [do charity] work in the United States? Do I want to work abroad?’” the actress explains. “Why do I have to pick one? The Girl Project works with four major organizations, so we’re actually serving 95 different countries, including the United States. And we know what the statistics are: Every year a girl is in secondary school, we know how much her life improves. So knowing that 50 million girls around the world don’t have access to secondary school education, it feels like we have to be doing all we can to tackle the problem.”
When she’s not saving the world on- or offscreen, you may find her deep in the world of social media, posting motivational messages for her 2 million-plus followers — because she knows they just need that sometimes.
Photo: Instagram
“Confidence is not a destination. It’s more of a mood — it comes and goes,” Bush says. “I’m sure on paper there are plenty of people who go, ‘She must be so happy. She has it all together. She’s exactly where she wants to be.’ No, I don’t, and no, I’m not,” she insists. “I have so many goals that I haven’t achieved yet. There are all sorts of things that make me think, like everyone else, ‘This is terrible! Everything is wrong.’ What I realized is, when I’m really making a concerted effort to give myself a little bit of the love that I know I deserve — that I don’t always give myself — I want to make sure that I also give that to my community. So it’s part of the reason I’m really dedicated to posting what I do. Because I need it, and I know other girls need it, and sometimes when you’re having a s*** day, just at the right time something comes up on your Instagram. I know that can turn my day around, so I want to be sure that I can maybe do that for someone else.”
So the next time you’re stressing about your insecurities, remember Bush’s advice.
“It’s not about needing to get dressed up or to put on a full face to impress someone else,” she notes. “It’s really about giving yourself the attention you deserve in whatever way you define that. And maybe you define that as a full face [of makeup] and lashes on a Friday night, or maybe you define that as fancy moisturizer and a hair mask. Whatever it is, if you’re doing it for you, it makes you feel worthy for yourself. Then I think you feel more worthy out in the world.”
But it shouldn’t matter what you look like on the outside anyway.
“A really beautiful woman is an empowered woman and a woman who’s really living authentically,” she smiles. “All of that stuff starts from within.”
For every message about women’s empowerment shared on social media using #MyTrueBeauty and tagging @ecotools, EcoTools will donate $1 to the Girl Project, up to $100,000. The initiative offers programs that support both the little and big things girls need to finish their education — items like tuition, safe passage to school, mentorship, confidence-building programs, and training for the professional world.
