Photo Credit: Andrea Raffin/Shutterstock.com

Style and wellness icon, Gwyneth Paltrow, is still aspiring us all to live our best and healthiest lives, no matter what age. The star recently turned fifty and sat down with Vogue to reflect on her past birthdays, all the emotions they’ve brought, and how this period of her life is empowering more than ever.

When it comes to reaching the milestone of turning fifty, Gwyneth is excited for what’s to come. She tells Vogue, “I feel great. I feel very happy and fulfilled and not scared and weirdly not freaked out about it. I remember turning 30 and feeling like there was so much pressure to be married and have a baby. I was not in a serious relationship when I turned 30, and I remember just thinking, I’m disappointing my parents. I haven’t married my stockbroker or a lawyer, and I’m this weird artist. When you’re in your 20s, you’re really a kid, and I think there’s this expectation that when you’re 30, you are going to really start to have a handle on your life. And then when I turned 40, I really freaked out.”

She goes on to explain how her career was built based off her looks which impacted her more than she realized, “[I freaked out] largely because I had a very strong relationship to my livelihood and importance being tied to my image and relevancy in the world. Rightly or wrongly, I really felt that way. When you’re kind of rewarded for being attractive and then you build a living and a livelihood, it’s predicted on that. It was not fully. Of course, I knew I was talented and smart, but there was this very real piece of that. So I was really questioning, What does it mean to lose that, If I am going to lose that? And how do I approach aging, and how do I want to define myself as a person who’s aging? Also I wanted to move back to America from England, and I was sort of realizing that my marriage wasn’t going to work. So it was a very tumultuous time for me. There was a real dismantling of a lot of stuff at the same time, and I really freaked out. I remember going to some doctor and getting Botox. It was terrible; it was so embarrassing. I was like, I’m such a cliche. I thought I had to redefine so many aspects of who I am. It wasn’t as scary as I thought, by the way, but going into it I think I had a particular set of unique circumstances.”

Photo Credit: Kathy Hutchins/Shutterstock.com

As for turning 50? The actress tells us, “It’s [turning 50] been a lot smoother than I thought. For the last year or so leading up to it, I have been ruminating on these different chapters in a woman’s life. What does it mean to go through perimenopause and then later menopause? And why is that a taboo, and why are we put out to pasture?”

“I’m really so happy with the people that my kids are, and I’m in a really fantastic relationship. And my work, even though it’s full of challenges, is very rewarding. I also feel very lucky to have my health and vitality, and I feel grateful to myself that it is an investment I started making in my mid-to-late 20s, with the exception of occasionally falling back into smoking a couple of times throughout. I feel like those choices that I started to make in my mid-20s around implementing a yoga routine; starting to really research and anecdotal experiment with healthier food, less processed food; and doing detoxes and stuff like that really set me on a path of getting to a place of turning 50, and crossing that threshold feeling great,” she shares. 

When it comes to Paltrow’s iconic style, well that hasn’t aged a day. She discusses how she feels about her outfits now saying, “Obviously, silhouettes have changed [over the years] and waist heights have raised and pant legs are different, but I still dress in the same vein. I’m simple. I’m minimal. I’m tomboyish/elegant. I don’t know how I would characterize it exactly, but sort of preppy with a little twist. I just wore the same red Tom Ford suit. I would still probably wear it if I had any of that stuff. Well, now especially because the ‘90s are so back in.”

Paltrow is also making a case for developing wrinkles telling Vogue, “…in our Western capitalistic culture, we have conflated youth and beauty and we have very little outside of that margin to explore. Maybe it’s because I have wrinkles and I’m almost 50 years old, but I’ve really recalibrated the way that I look at that stuff. I don’t relate to a 26-year-old model. I don’t want her life. I don’t want her face. I don’t want her experience. I’ve earned my life. I’ve earned my wrinkles. I have been through so many high and lows, and there’s a sweetness that starts to emerge from that, from having lived, from being wise, from being humble, from loving and losing and all of this stuff.”

She’s so goals. Happy birthday to our forever wellness and style icon. Here’s to 50!