This article contains affiliate links; if you click such a link and make a purchase, we may earn a commission.Jessica Simpson on Beauty, Tanning, and What She Reveals in Her New Memoir

Kathleen HouThu, April 2, 2026 at 6:39 PM UTC

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Jessica Simpson on Tanning, Beauty, and New MemoirKevin Mazur - Getty Images

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Jessica Simpson has always tried to be honest with herself. In a moment that was then ridiculed on TV, she questioned the meaning of “chicken of the sea.” In her bestselling memoir, Open Book, she talked in raw detail about body dysmorphia, childhood sexual abuse, divorce, and the consequences of being in the public eye for nearly two decades. “Refreshingly honest” is how many people describe her, and she is unafraid to talk about choices she’s made in the past. In a partnership with Kiehl’s for its new sunscreen, she maintains that same unfiltered spirit and revisits her past views on beauty, tanning, and self-care. Below, Simpson talks to ELLE about that old rumor of spending $1,000 on tanning, journaling as self-care, and a profound beauty moment that changed the course of her life.

I really enjoyed your memoir, it’s one of my favorites.

Oh really? I’m about to start another one. I’m always writing. It’s the only way that I can confront and be honest with myself, if I want to live my life right and understand it. I journal my way through a lot of thoughts and stuff. It’s a relationship that I have with myself that I don’t mind sharing with the world.

How do you maintain an honest relationship with yourself?

I mean, even in this campaign, they use my bloopers. People end up liking me as I am, instead of something forced, which I take as a compliment, even though it’s an eye roll at times. But it is just me. It’s a healthy relationship that I have with the public, in a way.

I remember seeing a lot of footage and photos of you tanning back in the day. What do you remember about tanning from the early 2000s?

I am a born-and-bred Texan sun lover. My birthday is in July and every birthday party I had was in the pool. My buns were always tan. I don’t remember wearing much sunscreen. I remember accelerator, Sun-In, and lemon juice for blonder hair. I feel like I used to wear Crisco. I had really great moments of worshiping the sun. Nowadays, I spray my kids when they go down to the park and am always putting it on myself too. It’s so funny, because that’s not the way I was raised. I definitely turned it around not just because of aging, but because there are lots of hazards to it.

But I definitely love a good tan. We’re about to go on spring break and my son is going to run away from me when I try and to put sunscreen on him, but my girls are pretty good about it. But partnering with Kiehl’s actually makes a lot of sense for me, because it is a natural, organic sunscreen that has been around for so long, and I really trust it. I still like the tan, trust me, but there are ways to go about it. My daughter teaches me more about skin care than I could ever teach her. Maxwell is 14 and she knows about skin. We challenge each other on water drinking, and we fill each other in on what masks to wear, and how to make your skin dewy and everything.

Back in the day, I read a report that alleged you spent $1,000 a week on tanning. Was that accurate?

No, $1,000? Gosh. I’d rather have lain out in the sun. Maybe it depends if you’re going to factor in a vacation with that budget. When I was playing Daisy Duke in The Dukes of Hazzard, I had to be tan and that was a four-month shoot where I was damn near naked the whole time. The only way to be confident then when shooting was to spray it, and do body makeup. But I also didn’t want it to be too orange, so I had to have a base tan. It was all thought out. I used to be the type of person that would put an SPF 15 on my stomach, but I would put an SPF 50 on my knees because I didn’t want them to wrinkle. I would do that math in my head.

A vacation to me means getting tan in a healthy way. I am somebody who likes to lay around and hang out with my friends and we flip like rotisserie chicken, just kidding. But for the most part, now we all take turns spraying each other down. I’ve never been that person who is terrified to be out in the sun because of wrinkles. It just happens and is a part of life.

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At what age do you feel like you started wearing sunscreen?

The worst sunburn of my life was when we went on a mission trip. My dad was a youth minister, so he took all the kids to Belize and we were in the villages doing Vacation Bible School. But after doing that, we had a day to go to the beach. I have never been more burned in my entire life. It was so bad that I actually thought I was going to die. I actually got sick and got sun poisoning. From then on, I was like, “The sun can literally kill me, I never want to feel this way again.” So around age 15, I started being like, “Let’s wear some sunscreen.”

You’re a mental health advocate. Are there any areas in beauty that you still struggle with?

I’m always trying to wrap my head around what is beautiful to other people. I know what beautiful is to me, and it really is just about how I feel inside. It’s reinforcing beauty from within, and letting that be a reflection of who we are. I am human and of course, I see flaws. I had a fitting last night, and I thought, Ugh, what do I do to make this outfit look better? I’m definitely hard on myself. I’m not as hard as the world is on me. But I’m hard on myself. If I allow all of those judgments and opinions to define my self-worth, it means that I’m going to be giving that to my children.

I never let my kids hear me say derogatory things about myself. I try really hard to bite my tongue if I’m feeling a moment of weakness, like if I’m feeling fat or gross. I try as much as I can to keep it to myself. I don’t want them beating themselves up or looking at me and thinking that they have to be like me. It’s all about perspective. If I’m having conversations with myself, journaling, and loving the heart of who I am—that comes out. It comes through my eyes and my skin and the way that I present myself. That self-work that we do with ourselves is probably the most important thing we can do.

You mentioned being curious about what other people find beautiful. I remember in 2010, you did a documentary series where you traveled to different countries to look at their beauty standards. What was that experience like and how did it affect you?

Oh yes, that was so fun. I did a TV series, and it was really ahead of its time. Back then, everybody was still so caught up in perfection. A lot of people have gotten better at accepting people as they are, for who they are, and finding that the most beautiful and unique things are what makes people stand apart. We went to different countries and saw their ideal of beauty. It was a profound experience. After doing that show, I took a break from the entertainment business. That was the last thing I did, until I made music recently.

The show really showed me that there’s more to life than what I was living, and that if I was going to settle down and have kids, I needed to wrap my head around the perspective of the beauty of life, my own personal beauty, and discover that without people telling me what it was.

I was very curious, and then very saddened by all these different pressures that all these women feel all over the world. I thought, how can I have some sort of positive voice in this? And I think that had to start within my own healing.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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