How Melissa Gilbert Really Feels About the Term ‘Anti-Aging’
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Melissa Gilbert shared her thoughts on the term “anti-aging.”
She called it “one of my least favorite expressions in the world.”
The actress, 60, is no longer interested in reversing the appearance that she’s earned.
At 60, Melissa Gilbert is all about embracing aging, but it wasn’t always that way. Twelve years ago, the Little House on the Prairie actress left Hollywood and the term “anti-aging” behind for good.
“I just didn’t feel like that was a safe place for me to age. It’s so anti-aging, which is one of my least favorite expressions in the world,” she recently told Page Six. “Anti-aging means dead.”
As the star has explained previously, living in Los Angeles made Gilbert feel pressured to conform to unrealistic beauty standards and ways of living. She said she felt like she had to “not get any older and stay a size 2 or 4 or whatever [she] was at that time.”
Gilbert’s move East ultimately landed her in upstate New York, where she lives a slow, intentional life with her husband, Timothy Busfield, and runs a community and lifestyle brand for older women called Modern Prairie. “I went from, ‘Oh God, I better not get older!’ to ‘Oh God, I’m so glad I’m older!’” she explained. “I love the age I am right now. 60 has been the most incredible year, just to look back on all the things I’ve done and to know that I’ve earned my opinions, I have value, I am wise.”
In a November interview with Fox News, Gilbert reflected on the moment she knew it was time to move on from Hollywood. “I had overfilled my face and my lips. My forehead didn’t move. I was still dyeing my hair red,” she recalled. “I was driving a Mustang convertible. I was a size two in an unhealthy way. I looked like a frozen version of my younger self, and that’s not who I was.”
When all of that stopped, “everything got easier,” she said. “And a bonus? I have a lot more free time not staring in a mirror, sitting in a dermatologist’s chair, or sitting in a hair chair.”
And she’s used that time wisely—for instance, she recently used her brand to raise pancreatic cancer awareness. “I have done so much,” she told Page Six. “And I continue to do it and it’s not over by any stretch of the imagination.”
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