Gwyneth Paltrow is accepting her “loosening skin” and wrinkles before she toasts her 50th birthday.
Gwyneth Paltrow is accepting her ‘loosening skin’ and wrinkles before she toasts her 50th birthday
The Oscar-winner, due to celebrate the milestone on September 27, added she has “let go of the need to be perfect” as she ages, after spending years detailing her painstaking and gruelling health, beauty and exercise regimes.
Gwyneth, who made the declarations in a long essay titled ‘On Turning 50’ published on her lifestyle site Goop on Thursday (22.09.22), said: “My body, a map of the evidence of all the days, is less timeless. A collection of marks and irregularities that dog-ear the chapters. Scarred from oven burns, a finger smashed in a window long ago, the birth of a child.
“Silver hair and fine lines. The sun has left her celestial fingerprints all over me, as if she soaked a brush in dark-taupe watercolour, flecking it over my skin.
“And while I do what I can to strive for good health and longevity, to stave off weakening muscles and receding bone, I have a mantra I insert into those reckless thoughts that try to derail me: I accept.
“I accept the marks and the loosening skin, the wrinkles. I accept my body and let go of the need to be perfect, look perfect, defy gravity, defy logic, defy humanity. I accept my humanity.”
Mum-of-two Gwyneth – who shares children Apple, 18, and Moses, 16, with her 45-year-old first husband and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who she divorced in 2016 – added she wants to slow down.
The actress-turned-businesswoman, now married to TV producer Brad Falchuk, 51, continued in her essay: “I would like to retreat a little bit. I would like to make my circle smaller. I would like to cook dinner more. I would like to see misunderstandings become understandings.
“I would like to continue to open the deepest part of myself to my husband, even though it scares me.
“I would like to sing more, even if it’s just in the shower. I would like to tell anyone that had a negative experience with me that I am sorry. I would like to fully acknowledge myself.”
She also recalled traveling to the Caribbean island of Nevis with their parents to celebrate the 50th birthday of her dad Bruce Paltrow, who died aged 58 in 2002 from complications of oral cancer and pneumonia.
Gwyneth said: “He said he was ‘fine’, but I found him swallowed by something – he felt bereft, unanchored in some way. It was unsettling.
“He could not embrace the milestone, this marking of the passage of time. Perhaps on some level he knew it would be his last decade.”
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