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Lincolnshire born singer Nicola Roberts Just turned 40, and during her birthday celebrations, her friends asked how she felt. She didn’t hesitate: “I have friends who didn’t manage to reach 40.
“So getting older is a privilege. We should be grateful for getting older, because it means we get to be together a little longer, and that’s extremely important.”
It’s a refreshing response from someone who has spent half his life in an industry based on staying forever young. But Roberts, who was once the youngest member girls out loudNot clinging to the past.
“If you truly accept and love who you are, there is freedom at any age,” she says.
That feeling of acceptance comes from everything she says and her new approach to well-being. Roberts is speaking as she embarks on a new chapter, having recently been announced as the face of Aveeno’s new Age Renewal range.
The collaboration seems fitting: The line promotes what has been called “grateful aging”, an adage that Roberts has been living by since the passing of his friend and fellow bandmate. sarah harding In 2021.
Harding died of breast cancer at the age of 39, just two months before her 40th birthday.
Losing Harding, Roberts says, puts a lot of things into perspective. It forced him to reconsider the constant pursuit of improvement that had long defined both his industry and his own habits.
“I’ve become softer on myself,” she says. “I don’t want to put my skin in it anymore.
“When I look in the mirror in the morning, I feel like it’s OK. I’m not tearing myself apart.”
The Aveeno partnership comes at a time when the message of taking care of your skin shouldn’t mean punishing it, it makes sense to them.
She says, “I still want skin care that does something, but it also has to reflect how I live. We don’t use toxic products at home; I don’t use scented shower gels. So it’s about finding that balance — products that are effective, but that also fit in with a more conscious way of taking care of myself.”
Roberts also says how big an impact diet has had on her skin, as she’s noticed the effects of what she eats become more pronounced as she ages.
“Diet is very important to me,” she says, “If I eat too much sugar, the texture of my skin changes.” Even my makeup is different. So it’s about balance. I know if I eat pizza and cake, I’ll get a breakout the next week.”
She laughs when she talks about her simplified routine. “I don’t think my skin can take that much information anymore,” she says. “I used to think that if it’s not tingling it’s not doing anything, but sometimes your skin just needs peace.”
This gentle approach has made her feel more confident, as she says, “I like how I look without makeup most days. I just like to be comfortable.”
Roberts’s measured relationship with beauty is hard-won. In her 20s, she became known as “the pale one” in Girls Aloud – an identity that came with constant scrutiny in an era when tanning was practically mandatory.
She recalls, “I definitely spent my time addicted to tanning and feeling like I needed to tan to fit in.”
“Coming from the nineties and noughties, being tan was considered attractive – if your skin color wasn’t like that, you were a bit of an outcast when it came to beauty standards.”
Eventually, she realized that her constant desire to tan was unhealthy. She says, “I got to a point where I realized I couldn’t tan – I’d just burn – and I realized how unhealthy my perception of beauty with tanning was.” “I finally realized I look much better in my skin color.”
That realization inspired her to make a BBC documentary about tanning addiction and skin cancer, and she was part of the campaign that helped change UK law to ban people under 18 from using sunbeds.
,Children They were skipping school in their uniforms and going straight to the tanning salon,” she recalls. “It’s crazy to me that something like body weight or skin color could fall into the fashion trend category.
“The fact that tanning is coming back now is quite strange – it’s like flared jeans. It shouldn’t be a trend when it’s about your health.”
The tendency to question what is considered “normal” beauty has only increased with age.
“You just have to have responsible conversations with yourself,” she says, “What’s important to me? How far do I take it? And this is a conversation you should have with yourself, not driven by peer pressure or social noise.
“If you don’t have self-love, and you’re trying to fill that hole with connection or attention, you’ll keep making decisions that don’t serve your true purpose,” she explains thoughtfully.
“Once you fill that hole with self-respect and love, you’re not reaching for other things to fill it — you can create boundaries and say no more easily.”
Therapy, she says, helped her get there. “How you look is a relationship with who you are – and with the encouragement and love you get from those around you. […] A therapist can help you reframe things, but self-love is really the root of everything.
And so at 40, Roberts isn’t trying to reinvent herself, but rather becoming more comfortable in her own skin.
“As you get older, you naturally and really beautifully get to the point where you don’t care,” she says, “you say, this is what it is, this is what I am, take it or leave it.”