• Salma Hayek opened up to Kelly Ripa about Botox and cosmetic procedures.
  • At 56, she said she’s never had the procedure done.
  • Instead, she swears by meditation and frequency devices for her youthful glow.

At 56, Salma Hayek has never had Botox—more specifically, she recently told Kelly Ripa on Ripa’s podcast, Let’s Talk Off Camera, “No Botox!” Ripa, who has been honest about her own experience with injectables, found that hard to believe. But it’s true, instead of Botox and cosmetic procedures, Hayek turns to an unexpected combination of practices to stay radiant: meditation and frequency devices.

“I do a lot of the frequency machines and they work on me better than on anyone,” Hayek explained. By that, she was referring to microcurrent devices like the NuFace and Solawave Wand. Her theory is, the massagers work exceptionally on her because she’s a frequent meditator, and their energies work together to deliver results.

“And just the meditation itself … sometimes when I’m doing it, people tell me when I come out of the room, ‘Oh my God, you look 20 years old,’” she added.

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Ripa asked Hayek exactly what her meditation practice looks like. She said it’s an “evolving” practice that she can do for hours—she just follows her instincts and the goal is to be in touch with her body. “The people that do the [frequency] machines say that the results I get, they don’t get with other people,” she explained.

Not only does she credit her meditation for glowing skin, but she said it also keeps her feeling physically well. “When I don’t [meditate] for some time, guess what? Not only [does] the face starts to drop and everything starts to drop, [but also] my herniated disc, the problem in my neck, the problem in my hip, my ankles [comes back]. I start breaking down,” she explained.

It’s very clear that the Magic Mike star is all about holistic health practices. In a recent Instagram, she posed nude in a sauna to share more wellness wisdom. “Embracing the healing power of the sauna and sweating out the stress this #WorldWellbeingWeek 🙏🏼, ” she wrote.

As for her skincare routine, she doesn’t overcomplicate that, either. She relies on natural kitchen ingredients like coconut oil to remove makeup and cleanse. “Then I use rose water to take off the residuals,” she told The New York Times in 2017. She also never washes her face in the morning, so as not to wash away “all the oils that your skin needs to look youthful,” she told British GQ in February.

Most importantly, she’s not afraid to show off the few wrinkles and white hairs she does have. She shared a close-up selfie of them in June, writing that she woke up to count how many have “crashed the party.”

For Hayek, getting older isn’t all about anti-aging. It’s about leaning into it and letting go.

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Kayla Blanton

Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.