Shenae Grimes-Beech on Negative Hollywood Beauty Standards: ‘What I Deemed Beautiful Was Not Considered Beautiful By The Masses’ (EXCLUSIVE)
Plus, what the '90210' reboot star taught her daughter about being ‘weird’
In her teens and early 20s, Shenae Grimes-Beech was making a splash as a teen drama star, first as Darcy Edwards in Degrassi: Next Generation (2004-2008) and then as Annie Wilson in 90210 (2008-2013), a reboot of the ‘90s hit series, Beverly Hills, 90210. Now 36, the mother, actress and content creator is having candid conversations about aging in Hollywood and what it’s like to gain the confidence to do so.
Woman’s World sat down with Grimes-Beech to discuss growing up in the limelight, the pressures she faced while on back-to-back hit TV shows and how she’s had to unlearn the mindset of staying young-looking forever.
Woman’s World: Many women feel the pressure to stay looking younger forever, especially in Hollywood. How has that been for you, growing up in front of the camera?
Shenae Grimes-Beech: It’s been a long process of unlearning as far as naturally aging goes. I think that has more to do with today’s current culture. I’ve been a bit of an alternative kid forever. I was always drawn to alternative beauty. I got my first tattoo when I was 14 years old, and those kinds of things were really not accepted in pop culture at the time that I was experiencing my height of fame. I just remember feeling like the way that I looked and what I deemed beautiful was not considered beautiful by the masses. I was directed by representation and a publicist to hire makeup artists and hair people and stylists to shape shift into the general public’s ideal of what a 20-something-year-old girl would be celebrated for looking like. And I found that really difficult to process, because it just did not align with how I felt most myself.
My later life has been a lot of unlearning and gaining the confidence to step outside of beauty norms and expectations on women. Social media gets knocked a lot because it upholds so many of these stereotypes and standards, but I found it a really empowering place. And through sharing my journey and expressing myself with fashion and beauty and aging, and moving into this next chapter of life, I’ve found my people who celebrate that alongside me and empower me.
WW: And you have a unique perspective because so many young women look up to you and have seen you on TV, so to hear you speaking about this now is so important for young girls everywhere.
SGB: And women my age. You said you watched 90210 and I think a lot of the people that find me on social media, some of them don’t even realize that I’m the same actress. But a lot of my audience online, we’ve grown up together. The shows that I was on and the characters I portrayed in the past always aligned with the age group that I was in. So, it’s so cool to now be in my mid to late 30s alongside other women who have grown up with me. We share a connection that runs decades long now.
WW: Do you feel that being a young actress negatively impacted your self-image or how you felt about beauty standards in general?
SBH: It definitely had a negative impact on my mental health. That was tied more to self-worth and value than the way I looked on the outside. But as I am now in this season of aging, I realized how much the external version of us as women is really tied to the value and the worth that society puts on us.
The older we get as women, the more experience we have, the more growth we’ve done, the more accomplishments we have. All the things add up to more, not less. And yet society really seems to push us into the background after we hit 30, which is crazy. There’s so much more life to live. And hopefully, by that point, you have an even stronger voice and even more powerful presence.
WW: Was there extra pressure on you to stay young-looking as someone playing a teen on a popular TV show?
SGB: I feel it more now than I did then. I think the chaos and height of fame was a lot and more than enough for me to process. So being youthful and all the rest of it really just didn’t factor into my world, because I was living it. It’s really now that I feel that pressure more and more. If people stumble across a photo of me or a video of me online, they’re, like, “Oh, you aged terribly, you look so old.” But they’re comparing me today to some version of me you keep in a time capsule in your brain from 15, 20 years ago.
With Botox and fillers being so common, people are given a really false sense of reality of what women 30-35 plus look like, because your perception is totally skewed. And I have no problem with using those—a vast majority of my friends use them, and they look gorgeous. It’s not about doing it or not doing it. It’s about transparency so that people’s expectations of others and themselves are realistic.
People are so quick to negatively comment on women in general. The choices they make and the things they say make people really uncomfortable. You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t. So [not getting Botox, fillers] is a choice that I make for myself right now. That choice can change. The lack of transparency with all of it comes from a place of people being scared to be honest and scared to not look a certain way because society tells us that we’re less valuable if we’re less pretty or less thin or have more wrinkles.
WW: Has having a young daughter helped to change or reshape your views on self-image?
SGB My purpose as a parent is doing the best I can with the tools I have to raise the best people. For me, that means people who are non-judgmental, people who are kind to others and themselves and who feel value and self-worth is not tied to anything temporary, like the way you look. And you do have to nip it in the bud, because it’s everywhere. The focus and attention on people’s body size, using the word fat and all of these negative connotations. It’s in the air, and they’re [the kids] little sponges. They’re just absorbing it all. I’m proud that at seven years old, my daughter believes that the word weird—because that’s something she was called as a younger child—has a positive meaning. If you’re weird, you’re unique, you’re special, you’re different. What makes us weird is what sets us apart from everybody else. And why would we ever want to be like everybody else? We believe that wholeheartedly, and she believes that now wholeheartedly and loves marching to the beat of her own drum. It’s that easy with kids.
My attention is on her because I know the pressures as a young girl, and I can’t even imagine it now. It’s grown exponentially with social media access to everything under the sun. I also think it’s really important to pay attention to how you’re raising your little dudes, too. I think there’s a cycle there as well that perpetuates a lot of this stuff. I’m definitely hyper-focused on the big picture with both of them.
WW: You’ve been having these candid conversations on social media about beauty and aging—what has that response been like and has it surprised you at all?
SGB: It would have never occurred to me to filter my life. I’ll be doing something totally unrelated online and I’ll see comments from people that say, “Came for nail inspiration, stayed for the skin texture.” I didn’t really notice that I was showing a close-up of my pores and wrinkles, and that was something that stood out to me as a positive because I wasn’t filtering it. That has stuck out to me because it was really unintentional. Initially, it was just me existing in my aging self and not trying to go out of my way to hide it, because it really just didn’t pop into my brain. Seeing how that has positively stood out to people has kind of made me want to shake things up a little bit more and speak to all of it more deliberately and intentionally.
We’re so lucky we get to age. We get to wear our life experiences on our face. I look at an older woman who looks chic as hell with very minimal makeup on, and long, gorgeous gray hair. And I think ‘That’s life goals right there.’ You want to sit with her and have a glass of wine and hear her stories. That’s the confidence that I aspire to have as I get older, so hopefully the rest of the world can catch up one of these days.
Conversation
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