You may not recognize Pamela Anderson these days.

Gone are the '90s beauty trends of seemingly endless layers of mascara and cheekbones smeared with body glitter. Lately, she’s gone more in the direction of gardencore, she tells Elle in a new profile published Thursday. “I’ve got my gardening hat on, my gardening gloves, my little jeans rolled up, I’ve got my whole look.” These days, Anderson is more interested in hitting her massive garden at her Canadian home and tending to her roses than walking the red carpet.

Part of the shift in her look Anderson owes to personal loss: After her makeup artist, Alexis Vogel, died of cancer in 2019, she told the magazine, “since then, I just felt, without Alexis, it’s just better for me not to wear makeup.”

She said shifting her norm from blonde bombshell to, well, blonde bombshell with way less makeup and maybe a little gardening dirt under her nails has been “freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious too. Because I did notice that there were all these people doing big makeup looks, and it’s just like me to go against the grain and do the opposite what everyone’s doing.” She’s embracing her 56 years. “I think we all start looking a little funny when we get older. And I’m kind of laughing at myself when I look at the mirror. I go, ‘Wow, this is really...what’s happening to me?’ It’s a journey.”

It’s a far cry from back in the day, when, she said, she often sported “the makeup from the day before, and a little bit of glitter from two nights before. The stuff that never leaves you! I’d be volunteering at the kids’ school, and I would catch myself in a reflection, and I’d have glitter all over my face. Which doesn’t make you a bad mom, just because you’re covered in glitter.”

Anderson also shared some good news for fans of her recent memoir, Love, Pamela: She’s hard at work putting pen to paper on the daily. Among her projects are a newsletter and a romance novel that she promises will be “very romantic and sexy and traumatic and funny.” It’s her happy place these days, that and her garden.

“If I’m not writing, I know I’m not in a good place,” she said. “If I’m writing, I am in my body. I am where I’m supposed to be.”

Overall, in her overalls and all, she told the magazine, “I feel rooted for. I feel good. I’m in a good place.”