Erin Wasson
Stereotypes can be a dangerous thing. They can put people in a box. We look at the images, we see job titles - we make assumptions. Politician? Liar. Banker? Snob. Model? Vacuous. But when it comes to Erin Wasson, the latter couldn’t be further from the truth.
WORDS | Carlie Fowler
This is a woman on a mission to live responsibly, to create something in this life that has real meaning, to leave an imprint behind that isn’t just about how many followers she has.
In fact saying Erin Wasson is a model is like saying a swiss army knife is a can opener. It sells them short. It narrows your focus. It betrays just how multifaceted she truly is. The more time we spent with her in her NYC loft, the more it dawns on us she’s like some sort of goddam creative polymath. Part time actress, stylist, designer, warrior, businesswoman, philanthropist and Full Time SoCal via SoHo Goddess.
In a world where it feels like everyone is trying to be like everyone else, where we replicate our outfits off Instagram and decorate our homes by way of Pinterest, Erin is distinctively, unapologetically herself. Like all of us, she may not be perfect but she is authentic. And that, that in itself is powerful.
Gliding through her home you quickly get the idea she's a woman who not only has a unique sense of style, but a great sense of herself. Wasson is not a follower and never has been. In many ways, she’s the girl off the grid, not subscribing to what society or this digital era expects of a woman in her profession. Her place is full of little insights into the way she sees the world.
Sometimes on a site that is all about beauty, it’s easy to get caught up in the products and the make up and style. But meeting a woman like Wasson is a reminder that real beauty is not how you wear your hair or what you put on your face, It’s about knowing who you are and owning it. It’s not about loving what you wear on your skin, it’s about loving the skin you are in. And fuck, with the daily onslaught of voices telling us otherwise, that is so much harder than it sounds. But as women, if we just remind each other enough, we just might start to believe it again. Thanks Erin.
On what makes a woman beautiful:
“I think that it’s our approach to how we connect with our spirit and our soul and how we intellectualise the magnitude of what beauty is. How many experiences we can form into this incredible dynamic story of who a woman is and the places that she’s walked down and the way that she treats people and the way that she is a friend and the way that she is a sister and the way that she is a daughter. All of those things amalgamate into a woman being simply undeniably beautiful. It’s a depth. It’s cerebral, really.”
On defining beauty;
“I think that beauty is actually very esoteric at the end of the day because you can’t really put your finger on it. It’s just something that exudes inside of someone and, often times I think that why a woman is beautiful is quite mysterious because it’s something that’s not maybe as obvious as we want to believe beauty to be, especially in the media.”
On skin:
“I think that the more aggressive you are with your skin, the more it’s going to come back with a vengeance. Women can go too hard with microdermabrasion and lasers and all of this stuff, at some point your skin’s going to go, ‘Hey, we’ve been protecting you since the beginning of time. We know how to heal ourselves.’ It’s an organ. You wouldn’t go scraping around on your kidneys and your liver.”
On skin cell turnover:
“I think that every single product and lotion should have something enzymatic, whether it’s papaya or any kind of fruit enzyme which is a natural exfoliant. I think it’s the least abrasive and it’s the most natural thing that you can do to affect cell turnover, you know, sloughing off all that dead shit.”
On what’s more important than taking extreme anti-ageing measures:
“You have to think, how much work, like the real work, needs to be done. Go see a healer. Go see a naturopath. Why don’t you find out information of what’s going on inside of your body to then help … switch your mindset.”
On ageing:
“I understand that women enjoy doing little tweaks just to sort of soften things and to make things a little bit less so. Which is fine but, as I said, I’m definitely of the latter where it’s going to happen no matter what and I think that the more you manipulate the more you’re just going to look ridiculous. I’ve seen it time and time again. You’re putting unnatural things into your face. It’s really frightening.”
“We have to trust in our skin to know how it can evolve with us. I’ve got a lot of girlfriends, especially living out in LA that really fight with this obsession of youth in Los Angeles. It’s really in your face all the time and I have a lot of friends who are younger than me, who are like twenty, twenty-nine, and thirty years old, and they’re already starting to get all these fillers and botox-y things.”
On what matters:
“If you meet a happy person then all of a sudden you wouldn’t even think of that kind of stuff… You wouldn’t think, ‘Oh gosh, did you see her? She’s aged a bit.’ It’s like, ‘Did you see her? She seemed so fulfilled and happy.'”
Read the full article here.
Photo Credits: SORAYA ZAMAN
