She adds: “Everybody chimes in on someone’s figure, their face, their nose, their hair, their weight. And so to me the pressure now is not from Hollywood. The pressure is from the human race and it’s as unhealthy as the Hollywood pressure. We are as unkind to each other as Hollywood ever was to women.”
When it comes to beauty, it’s clear that SJP’s upbringing with her seven siblings in Nelsonville, Ohio has influenced her approach. “The entire family, so ten people, shared one bathroom,” she says. “It wasn’t like I was sneaking in and watching my mother get ready. If she got the bathroom [to herself] she probably locked the door and we weren’t witness to her. Me and skin? I wasn’t thoughtful about it.”
So she’s grown to take a very simplistic approach to skincare: “Simplicity and efficacy for me is everything. When you are working on set, you are wearing a lot of makeup, which even to apply for me is a lot of valuable time. So I like to keep my routine basic and effective.”
When I asked her what beauty or self-care advice she would give to her younger self, she tells me: “I’m not really someone who participates in the self-care conversation. I don’t really like it. I don’t think that most real working women, working parents – people who are holding down two or three jobs, literally – are in a position to think about self-care. I think just having five minutes alone, never mind having five minutes that don’t involve worry, concern about your children, money, paying bills, feeding yourself, or others…To me it’s a topic that is so out of touch.”
Most celebrities have jumped on the self-care bandwagon, posting elaborate routines in marble-clad bathrooms or walk-in closets. So as a Black woman, I found some comfort in witnessing someone with so much celebrity leverage having the language to describe privilege so eloquently.
SJP’s jaded feelings on the subject can be traced back to her childhood and her mother. “I never thought about self-care as a young person. I was working from age eight and my mother never had time for self-care,” she adds. “It feels like it really comes off as privilege, maybe?”
“I’m sure she found ways of getting out of the house and being with a friend, and that was her version of self-care, reading a book,” she continues. “If she would be driving us to dance lessons or school, she always had a book in her lap, always. My mom stopped the car at a red light. She would look down, she’d be reading and we’d say: ‘Mommy, the light’s turned green.’ And I think I have the same thing. I always have a book with me,” she says as we stare at her encyclopaedia-sized novel on the coffee table.
When Sarah Jessica Parker isn’t busy running an empire, or getting lost in the pages of a great book like her mother, she tends to her children (she has one son James, 20, and twin daughters, Marion and Tabitha, 14, with husband and fellow actor Matthew Broderick). “Motherhood taught me to be better at being patient and that the things I’m telling my children are important, are sometimes the very things I need to be thinking about for myself.” In other words, taking your own advice? “Exactly!,” she says, laughing.