- Jennifer Love Hewitt is opening up about aging in Hollywood after being accused of undergoing plastic surgery.
- “It’s really hard because you can’t do anything right,” she said.
- Rumors surfaced about her appearance after she posted a filtered selfie.
A few months after denying plastic surgery rumors, Jennifer Love Hewitt is reflecting on how difficult it is to age in Hollywood. “Aging in Hollywood is really hard,” she recently told Michael Rosenbaum on his Inside of You podcast. “It’s really hard because you can’t do anything right.”
It all started when Hewitt showed off her new haircut on Instagram. “I was getting my hair done and I had not a stitch of makeup on so I threw on a filter,” she said. “And it was just a filter that, at the time, looked nice in the light at the salon. I really gave it no thought.”
Then came the hate comments. “A bunch of people were like, ‘Jennifer Love Hewitt is unrecognizable,’” she recalled. “And then another place was like, ‘She’s unrecognizable and so she’s gone to filters because she doesn’t want us to know how bad she actually looks now in her 40s. And I was like, ‘This is crazy right?’”
To make light of the situation, she shared more selfies with “over-the-top, crazy” filters, but it only made matters worse. “I was like, ‘All natural, no filter,’ like trying to make fun of it, and then they came after me for that and they were like, ‘Well, now she’s just defending herself,’” Hewitt said. “And I realized, I was like, ‘I can do no right.’”
Rosenbaum went on to ask her why she wasted energy caring about naysayers, and she replied: “Because to pretend that we don’t is a lie.” However, she maintained that “the majority of people” have been “very kind” to her throughout her career, which took off when she starred in I Know What You Did Last Summer, Party of Five, and then Ghost Whisperer in the ’90s and early 2000s.
“They’ve grown up with me. They look like I do now,” she said of her fans. “We’re all getting lines and maybe in menopause and who knows what else is coming for us.” She added that the other main reason she’s offended by shallow insults is because, “I’m the mother of a girl,” she said.
“It’s dangerous what we put on people,” the 44-year-old added. “It’s dangerous, I think, to say to women, ‘You can’t look like you’re not 22 to me anymore because I don’t know how to take that.’”
She continued: “I’m 44, and this is what I look like.”
(Commenters on Hewitt’s original hair selfie accused the star of undergoing a brow lift, specifically, per Allure. At the time, she said she’s only ever gotten microblading (brow tattooing) done in that area. And while that may be true, recent Instagrams picture her promoting Emface, an in-office face sculpting treatment that utilizes radio frequency and muscle stimulation to lift and tone features.)
Despite what some may think, Hewitt said she feels way more comfortable in her skin now than she ever did as a young actress. “At 23, 24, 25, I didn’t feel self-confident,” she told Rosenbaum. “I felt watched. I felt like I had to be everything for everybody all the time ... I was called sexy before I ever knew what being sexy was. Like, I was 17 years old on the on the cover of Maxim, and I had no idea why.”
Hewitt concluded: “That girl was so insecure and so confused and trying her best.”
And the latter seems to remain true today.
Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.
