Dolly Parton Once Felt She Looked Like ‘Hell’ Without Makeup
Dolly Parton has always been pretty big on make-up. The country music star quipped she rarely went out in public without cosmetics because she wasn’t too proud of her natural appearance.
What Dolly Parton tells people who wonder what she’s like without makeup
It’s no secret that Parton enjoys make-up. She theorized that her fascination with cosmetic products stemmed from her childhood. Her father, Robert Lee Parton, forbade Parton and her sister from wearing makeup in the household when growing up. So when Parton finally left her home, she couldn’t help but indulge in what she’d been missing out.
“Maybe that has something to do with the fact that as soon as we got away from home, we practically made a career out of makeup and the other trappings of what we considered to be femininity,” Parton once wrote in the memoir Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “To paraphrase the Bible, ‘Bring up a child in the way you think he should go, and when he is old he will make you pay for it the rest of your life.’ Many a bellman struggling under the weight of my makeup bags has had to pay as well.”
Parton’s makeup helped create an iconic look for the singer. But for those wondering what she might look like without cosmetics, she once joked the answer would disappoint them.
“If somebody says, ‘What do you look like without that make-up?’ I say, ‘I look like hell,’” Parton once told Radio Times (via AZ Central). “But that’s ok, who doesn’t? I’m not a natural beauty, that’s one of the reasons I’m over-exaggerated. I feel better when I put on a little make-up – I don’t like looking in the mirror and thinking, ‘Who the hell’s that ugly old man?’”
Dolly Parton once shared she puts on make-up at night
It might be common practice for some to sweeten up the face a bit after getting up in the morning. But Parton takes it a step further by also keeping her make-up on at night before bed.
“I do all my beauty work and cleaning my face in the morning because I usually try to keep my makeup on at night,” she once told the Wall Street Journal. “Because I never know if there’s going to be an earthquake or a tornado or a storm and I’m going to have to go out in the middle of the night.”
Parton quipped this was also done to benefit her husband Carl Dean, towhom she’s been married for decades.
“This is also true back home in Tennessee. I don’t want to go to bed looking like a hag with Carl,” she once wrote in her memoir Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones.
Dolly Parton once revealed the only way people might see her without makeup
Parton quipped that she was determined to keep her natural looks to herself as long as she was alive. Although, there were a couple of circumstances where she might be forced to abandon her cosmetics at home.
“You’d just have to see me laid out on a stretcher,” Parton once joked to People. “No, if my husband was sick, or if there was an emergency, of course, I would [leave the house without makeup].”
Even if Parton was arrested, the star maintained that she would still try to look good when in front of the camera.
“If I got arrested for a bad tag or whatever, I don’t want a mugshot looking like some of the stars I’ve seen,” she added. “I’m going to clean up a little if I’m going outside, unless there’s an absolute emergency, and it would have to be pretty serious. I would do it then, but that would be the only way.”
