“A little bit of Botox,” she says, pointing to the space between her brows. “But I’ve chilled, actually.”
“No filler?”
“No filler.”
“Your lips and your cheeks? No filler?”
“No filler. Never filled either one, ever.”
“Eyelash extensions.” This I present as a fact, not a question. “No.”
Um, yes. “Yes.”
“No. I’ve never had eyelash extensions. I’ve never done anything. I have a drop of mascara on today. I’ve never filled my cheeks. I’ve never filled my lips.”
Dolly’s authenticity, her openness about where she came from, who she was then, and how it shaped the decisions about how she wanted to look and why, made her extreme enhancement not only acceptable, but gave us permission to appreciate it.
A portrait of Dolly Parton in 1989.
Getty Images
Last year, I wrote a piece for this magazine after we were all deluged with photos of Kris Jenner’s new face. I felt I needed to remind everyone, myself included: No 69-year-old looks like Kris Jenner in real life. Not even Kris Jenner. In her public presentations, Dolly’s surgeries and wigs certainly defied her age—but she was the one giving us the reality check, reminding us in interviews that her public-facing self was not what she looked like without the makeup and the lighting. Once asked if her husband Carl Dean ever worried about holding on to such a striking woman, she laughed, “Oh no, because he knows what I really look like.” No one looks like Dolly. Not even Dolly. And she wanted us to understand that.
Dolly’s greatest legacy is existential in nature. “Piling on wigs and feathers, she showed that you can be yourself while playing a character,” wrote Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic. Dolly Parton was never apologetic about her aesthetic choices, whether in cup size or colors. In a 2020 video she made with Allure she said, “I like a lot of makeup, daytime or nighttime. And I like colors. And a lot of people say, ‘Oh, don’t wear blue eye shadow.’ I said, ‘But I like blue eye shadow. I don’t care if it’s fashionable.’ They said, ‘Don’t buy a blue car.’ I like blue cars too. Blue’s blue, I love blue.”
