Supermodel Rachel Hunter discovers how beauty is defined around the world
They say beauty is only skin-deep, but tell that to the multi-billion dollar beauty industry—you know, the one that consumes women around the world. Between the North American magazine covers with photo-shopped models displaying big hair and perfect teeth, the Parisian women with their wine and ability to eat all day, a Japanese culture obsessed with skin whitening, and the camels’ milk beauty treatments covering modestly dressed women in Dubai, the standards around the world may differ, but it’s clear that beauty standard do exist everywhere.
New Zealand supermodel Rachel Hunter, who now resides in Los Angeles, is no stranger to the business of beauty. Having started her modelling career 30 years ago, she’s been long obsessed with her looks thanks to the advice given to her at a young age. Not that she spends an abundance of time looking in the mirror, but she did go through a period where she always covered up in scarves in order to hide her jowl area when people told her she should consider plastic surgery.
“In real life, I was fairly happy with myself, and in photographs, I was horrified,” she says. “Judgment and beauty, they really shouldn’t go together. Any culture that’s trying to swipe this world to all look like their particular culture is going to ruin the diversity and the importance of culture full stop.”
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In order to explore that diversity of beauty, Hunter recently embarked on a global fact-finding mission, as documented in her new television series, Rachel Hunter’s Tour of Beauty. Throughout countries like France, Dubai, Korea, Greece and Japan she drank the Kool-Aid served to women in various forms, from bullfrog tea for longevity and anal-probe treatments designed to “massage” the worries away.
“I actually had an enema too with honey and herbs on TV,” she recalls. “I don’t know what I was thinking, but, it was literally like a hard thumb that was well… it was a steel probe that was needled into the pressure points. That did hurt. But it was very necessary, and I learned a lot about myself.”
How exactly does one learn about oneself via a probe? According to Hunter, it all boils down to doing what makes you feel beautiful, no matter what country you’re in. And so as she focused on the super foods, coconut oils and plant-based products offered in various countries, she also made a note to understand the mentality behind the treatments and what cultural influences made them so popular in the first place.
In France, it’s popular belief that women are skinny despite gorging on bread and cheese. While Hunter admits she didn’t find an exact answer to that magic other than “moderation,” some women did point her to a magic wine that supposedly helped break down the fats in said cheese and meats. Others called her attention to a grape vine extract called “resveratrol,” a natural compound believed to have health benefits against things like cancer, heart disease, weight-loss and aging.
Over in Greece, Hunter took a more traditional view by visiting the self-sufficient Ikarian people, whose lifestyles don’t bend to the traditional stress often associated with the North American culture. It’s one of the few places on Earth where people are known to live long, balanced lives with less cancer and heart disease than the rest of the world. And in Dubai, Hunter juxtaposed the perceived lavish lifestyle with a simpler beauty regimen involving camels’ milk and dates that has been used for hundreds of years for its health benefits.
Meanwhile in South Korea, Hunter took a different approach when she visited a plastic surgeon based in Seoul—the plastic surgery capital of the world—to get a consultation on how he would change her face. While he didn’t recommend anything too drastic (a little fine-tuning, if you will) she’s quick to note that isn’t always the case by pointing to an extreme example of a women who has exhausted every level of fine-tuning possible. There’s no judgement on Hunter’s part, per se, but it did open up the model’s eyes to the overall concept of beauty and self-worth.
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“If you are going to get plastic surgery, there’s a lot of emotional ways to look into it to make sure that you really want to do this for you, you are not doing this for somebody else,” she says. “That moment of beauty when a woman actually feels beautiful, is the synchronicity between internal and external that have to have this amazing harmonious moment. There’s some freedom that happens where you are laughing, enjoying yourself. You are not obsessed, going, ‘Am I good enough?’”
On the surface it seems fairly easy for a supermodel to let go of the ideas of traditional beauty and advocate doing whatever it takes for a person to feel beautiful. But it took a long time for Hunter to think that way, and it wasn’t until she saw how other cultures embraced beauty that she could finally embrace her own.
“When I first started modelling, the idea of what beauty was [was] that certain look. After going on this journey and seeing other cultures, away went that superficial idea of beauty,” she says. “The ideas of beauty are old and need to be shattered. The importance of individuality, of being joyful and happy and connected and to have self‑acceptance is extremely important of the well‑being of women and men.”
Now that’s universality we can get behind.
