Actress Selma Blair on Legally Blonde Beauty Malfunctions, Jackie O Bangs, and Her “Goldilocks” Skin Savior
What first strikes me about Selma Blair when we sit down in a lush NYC penthouse isn’t her star power (however palpable it may be), but her warm demeanor—a stark contrast to the calculating, East Coast-chic character I grew up with: Vivian Kensington à la Legally Blonde. Her eyes light up as we take a trip down memory lane at Harvard Law (ahem, UCLA, cloaked in Cambridge movie magic), where she lets me in on a little secret: her skin was a mess that entire shoot.
“I've made a lot of faux pas,” Blair laughs. The actress and activist underwent some serious beauty treatments to achieve the look of her Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis-inspired character, which aggravated a skin condition she’d then deal with for years: Dermatitis, by way of hairline threading. “I have this tiny forehead, and for Legally Blonde, they threaded it because they wanted me to look more East Coast—like Jackie O,” she explains. That quintessential preppy style of hers, including the thick headbands and swooping side bangs? It was half-character, half-necessity. “That’s why I was wearing argyle berets—covering up my dermatitis skin from them threading my little forehead,” she adds.
Blair’s repertoire of cult classics had her on the big screen consistently, and as someone with highly sensitive skin—something she didn’t know was exacerbated by her multiple sclerosis (MS)—the actress tried every cream, serum, and laser she could to assuage her rosacea-stricken barrier for the cameras.
“My skin, once upon a time, was a mess,” she tells me. Having “autoimmune skin,” especially without knowing it, made her ashamed of her lack of progress, despite having gone to so many highly regarded facialists and dermatologists to pinpoint the issue. After too many brushes with skincare fads that promised change and offered a boomerang, Blair was done.
"I got spooked," she tells me. “It was just not simple. It just was one of those things, almost like my MS, , ‘I don't know what to do with you,’” she reminisces. “I wasn't diagnosed for so many years, and it was the same with my skin.”
It wasn’t until a facialist pressed a bottle from an Australian skincare brand, ESK, into her hands to quell Blair’s angry skin that the actress experienced any kind of complexion relief. ESK, short for Evidence Skincare, became Blair's preferred brand organically, but there was one product in her lineup missing—both in her collection and on the shelves—that she decided to dream up with the brand's founder and physician, Ginni Mansberg, MD.
Blair's ask was this: a single product that could reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, smooth the skin, boost hydration, strengthen the barrier, and minimize hyperpigmentation, all while being safe for highly reactive skin. Simple, right?
