They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but unfortunately, this doesn't always ring true for women in Hollywood. Just ask actress Jamie Lee Curtis.
At the height of her career, the Halloween star struggled with maintaining the industry's beauty ideals, and even went under the knife for some nip-and-tuck while in her thirties.
She hoped that a little bit of cosmetic surgery would help her keep her youthful appearance, but it wasn't until she became addicted to the doctor-prescribed painkillers that she began to realize how wrong she had been.
"I've done it all. I've had a little plastic surgery. I've had a little lipo. I've had a little Botox. And you know what? None of it works. None of it," Curtis said in a 2002 interview with Telegraph UK.
Curtis' fear of loneliness, aging, and appearing different from her shapely character in Perfect drove her to increase her drinking, and before she knew it she was abusing alcohol on top of the pills.
Hollywood was not helping her in anyway, in fact, producers, directors, and cameramen only pushed her further down the rabbit hole by insisting that she keep up a certain look.
"Ten years ago, before anybody did that, I had fat taken from underneath my eyes because I was on a movie and I was puffy," the actress recalled. "I remember the cameraman saying: 'I can't shoot her now'. I remember being mortified."
Eventually, Curtis came to her senses and realized the toll her addiction and low self-esteem was taking on her life as well as her daughter's. She voluntarily entered a rehab program, and has since made a lot of permanent changes to her appearance, and that has allowed her to feel like herself again.
Aside from giving up drugs and alcohol, Curtis swore off plastic surgery and a number of other superficial things.
"All of these 'bettering' experiences are not without risk," the actress said. "And there is this illusion that once you do it, then you'll be fine. And that's just horseshit. I looked worse."
As part of her recovery, the Freaky Friday actress made a pact with herself to stop caring about what other people make of her appearance.
"I'm trying hard to take the veil off the fraud, to be real, to start with me. In the recovery programme I'm in (for addiction problems), they talk about peeling an onion, exposing more layers."
Her newfound carefree attitude also meant giving up dying her hair and letting it go grey, as well as forgoing high heels.
While these changes have helped Curtis be less hard on herself, they don't mean that she gave up taking care of herself altogether.
For instance, a few years ago when she noticed that she was starting to gain weight, she made some changes and dropped the extra pounds. She did it on her own volition, not because she was shamed into doing so.
"I'm going to look the way God intends me to look . . . with a little help from Manolo Blahnik," she said.
The former scream queen has been using her experience as a volunteer counselor for anti-drug campaigns to help those struggling with addictions.