1980s icon defends decision to age naturally despite pressure: ‘I think I look rad’

It’s no secret that Hollywood stars, particularly women, feel pressure to keep up their looks as they get older. We constantly hear about the latest cosmetic procedures and routines the celebs are doing to stay young.

But some decide to just embrace their own natural looks and age gracefully, like Justine Bateman, who recently spoke out about her decision to not have work done despite societal pressures…

Justine Bateman is an actress, director and writer best known for playing Mallory in the 1980s sitcom Family Ties when she was a teenager. She also starred in Men Behaving Badly and had recurring roles in shows like Desperate Housewives and Still Standing. She’s the older sister of actor Jason Bateman.

“I just don’t give a s—,” she said in an interview with 60 Minutes Australia. “I think I look rad. I think my face represents who I am. I like it.”

“I feel like I would erase, not only all my authority that I have now, but also, I like feeling that I am a different person now than I was when I was 20. I like looking in the mirror and seeing that evidence.”

Justine Bateman is now 57, and like many actresses of her age she has faced pressure to get plastic surgery — but instead, she has decided to never get any work done and embrace her age.

Bateman said she received insulting comments about her looks from the time she was 40, and people compared her naturally-aging face to a “sea hag” and a “meth addict.” She felt pressure to get cosmetic surgery or botox.

“I thought my face looked fine,” she told People in 2021. “And then because of some of the fears I had, unrelated to my face, I decided to make them right and me wrong… I became really ashamed of my face, ridiculously so.”

But eventually Bateman decided to ignore the criticisms about her looks and embrace natural aging. “You’re not going to make that fear go away by changing your face,” she said.

“If you go and get plastic surgery, you’re going to look different. Okay. You’ll have that, but you haven’t dealt with what the fear was. That fear will continue… I think getting all this plastic surgery is just people pleasing.”

The actress, who previously wrote about this issue in her book Face: One Square Foot of Skin, said she feels “sad” for women preoccupied with cosmetic procedures and hopes they will embrace their natural beauty.

“I feel sad that they’re not just enjoying life,” she told 60 Minutes. “I feel sad that they are distracted from the things that they’re meant to do in life with this consuming idea that they’ve got to fix their face before anything else can happen.”

We think Justine Bateman looks beautiful! No one should feel pressure to change the way they look — thank you to Justine Bateman for encouraging more women to age naturally.

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