Elle Fanning Shares Her Journey to Self-Confidence

“Beauty is not just what you look like from the outside,” the actress reminds us.

Elle Fanning loves having fun with makeup. She has been known to rock bold looks in her modeling campaigns and on the red carpet – and she’s even one of the celeb ambassadors for L’Oreal. But the actress knows that there’s a difference between obsessing over and wearing fun lipstick shades and thinking that true beauty is a purely external kind of thing.

“Beauty is not just what you look like from the outside. I’ve certainly experienced not feeling super confident,” Elle shared in a new interview with Glamour. 

“I was home-schooled until third grade. In fourth grade I went to a regular school, and it was the first time I had been in a classroom with kids my age, so I was a little freaked out,” she explained. “My hair is actually really curly, so I got it blown out straight, and I wore contacts—my eyes are terrible—and this one boy came to me on the playground and said, ‘You’re so beautiful. I’m going to marry you!’ Whatever. Then the next day I washed my hair, so it was curly, and wore my glasses. And he told me, ‘I’m not going to marry you anymore.’ I’m like, What? All because of physical appearance? Heartbreaking. Think of ‘The Princess Diaries,’ which I love, where she has glasses and really curly hair, and then you remove those and: Wow! She’s so hot.

If you follow Elle on social media, you may have noticed that she loves posting a mix of her most glamorous red carpet and modeling moments alongside her goofy pics with her dog, pizza lunches, and BFFs. She shared that this is something she likes because beauty doesn’t have to be all about crafting a perfect “image.”

“I think [moving beyond this old view of beauty] starts with what people put out there. Airbrushing is not attractive. Imperfections are what’s beautiful,” she shared, adding “I like to post funny, not-so-serious things.” 

Showing off who she really is is what makes Elle a must-follow: not the 100% perfectly filtered images!

Written by Kristine Hope Kowalski