Model Natasha Poly: why I put fresh strawberries all over my face

I have my mother’s cheekbones. She didn’t make a big thing of them when I was younger, though. She was a working woman and didn’t concentrate on her looks. She wore a little pencil under her eyes, but that was it. She also used to make her own clothes. Remember: this was communist Russia, so you had no choice.

When the Soviet Union collapsed [in 1991; Poly was six], everyone was depressed. I have a memory of everything feeling dark and grey. We didn’t know what would happen – my grandmother lost all her savings. Even though we had more “options”, we were scared. We were used to dressing the same, to being equal; if you had more than someone else, it felt like you were showing off. I love that Russian fashion is in fashion now, and that Balenciaga is doing the whole 90s babushka thing – I want to buy it all. Maybe that is strange.

Before I became a model [she was scouted aged 15 in her home town of Perm, 1,200 miles east of Moscow], magazines felt like an untouchable world. Models were just images, they were not real people. To me, beauty, modelling ... it was not a real profession. Beauty and fashion took a long time to reach us, so I learned most of my tricks from a 50s book my grandmother gave me, based on conversations between two housewives. I once boiled up the brown skin of an onion and washed my hair with it to dye it strawberry orange. It worked. I also learned how to use water bottles as weights to stay in shape and how to make a hair mask from egg (and from beer, which smelled pretty bad). One thing that definitely works is putting fresh strawberries all over your face, like a mask. It’s great on sunburnt skin because of all the vitamin C.

Source: theguardian