“Have you ever tried ground cherries?” Pamela Anderson asks me within seconds of getting on our Zoom call. I admit I haven’t — at least knowingly.
Neither had the actor, activist, and best-selling author until she stumbled upon the fruit in the garden on her family’s Vancouver Island property. “I thought it was a tomatillo, with the little paper baskets around the little tomatoes, and when I tried one, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s not a tomato. That’s a cherry,’” she goes on to explain. “It’s a really earthy, interesting fruit. So I’ve been obsessed with them.”
This obsession led to the creation of her Sonsie skin care brand’s latest launch, a new flavor of the Basic Balm called Wild Groundcherry. This limited-edition variety plumps and hydrates with peptides and adds a soft, warm golden shimmer to the lips without the use of microplastic-derived glitter. “It [ground cherry] was something that surprised me in my garden, so when talking about new flavors for the lip balms, I thought, ‘Everyone likes to be surprised,’ so that’s it,” Anderson says. “I wanted a shimmery lip balm that still shows your natural lip color and is made without the microplastics.”
The shimmery addition to her skin care line is playful, an approach she’s recently taken to her famously pared-down red carpet looks. After sticking to makeup-free looks for years, Anderson recently revisited the smoky eye for last month’s Vogue World 2026 at Milan Fashion Week. She’s also been having fun with a number of retro-glam hairstyles as of late.
“I think I’m not trying to be pretty, because what is pretty? Pretty seems very subjective, and it feels kind of trendy, but I think, ‘How do you want to present yourself to the world?’” she says of her more “primitive approach” to beauty. “I love women that are interesting, of all ages. So I’m just playing around. I’m not falling into the trappings [of current beauty standards], not that I haven’t in the past. Now I feel so free that I just want to do it my way. If I want to put an eye on and nothing else, or put on, I don’t know, whatever, I’ll do it. I’m just playing around.”
Stefania M. D’Alessandro/Getty Images
Anderson says this sense of freedom comes from developing the confidence and self-acceptance that make going against the grain less fearful. “I feel like that was the moment that really freed me or the time that really freed me — when I realized I’m not in competition with other people,” she shares. “This is an internal quest. Beauty comes from within.”
She’s right: Ultimately, beauty does come from within. But it also can be found in her beloved garden. “We have great ingredients, great research and development people, and sustainability is important to us. But we have fun with flavors every once in a while that I’ve discovered in my garden,” Anderson says. “We only made so many [of Wild Groundcherry], and then those will be gone. Then I’ll just have to find something else, so it’s kind of like the quest. I feel like a little fairy in my garden. I always say I’m Sonsie’s garden fairy godmother.”
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