Bethenny Frankel says she has a 'young spirit' at 52: 'I don't take myself too seriously'
At 52, Bethenny Frankel is embracing a "young spirit" — so much so that she coined her new rosé line Forever Young.
"I was a cocktail waitress…saving up to live in France. And the last song at the end of the night was always 'Forever Young,'" she explains of why she chose the name. "And of course, I'm getting older, and I'm at a different stage than I was during my last venture. But, I have a young spirit, and I don't take myself too seriously. I feel like I speak the language of someone who is 21, and someone who is 78."
Frankel, who "loves when things connect," says that her new rosé works well with her partnership with U.K.-based beauty brand No.7 on its Future Renew Damage Reversal collection.
"It's summer, the season where we're thinking about aging and skin damage," she explains, adding that she first was introduced to the beauty brand at the U.K. pharmacy Boots, which she went to with her mom while visiting relatives overseas.
Frankel is "very passionate about how you don't have to spend a lot of money" in order to get great makeup and skin care — something that routinely comes up on her social media hauls. (A good washcloth, she says, is top of her list of must-have beauty products.) "There's nothing you can't get in the drugstore," she says.
As a mom to a 13-year-old daughter Bryn, she tries to stress that less is more when it comes to both makeup and skin care.
"The skin is an organ," she says. "I look at my daughter, and she's a tween, and she has pimple medicine everywhere, and, you know, it's too much stuff…Less is more, and wearing makeup really does a lot of damage to your skin. It's clogging pores, it's making you break out."
Frankel may have cut her teeth on reality TV, but now, she takes her most passionate thoughts and opinions online, whether she's making TikToks about what is (or is not) worth purchasing at a high-end market, or the right way to freeze a bagel for optimal reheating.
Sometimes her conversations get a bit more personal — like sharing her experience with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). In February, she took to social media to respond to comments about why her face looked "different" in her videos. She explained it was a reaction to her autoimmune condition, which can cause a variety of symptoms, including chronic dehydration.
At the time, Frankel said, "When you comment on someone's physical appearance, you may not know exactly what they're enduring personally, physically and emotionally."
Looking back at the video now, Frankel, who has also founded the disaster relief initiative BStrong, says she was surprised by how many people wanted to talk about the condition.
"Everybody wants me to give them the keys to the kingdom of the solution of what to do," she says. "You have to be on the case and learn what you learn along the way and do the best you can. It's really not that easy."
One thing that also isn't always easy is friendship — such as the one between Frankel and her former best friend and RHONY co-star, Jill Zarin. The two recently reunited on Frankel’s ReWives podcast, marking the first time in 13 years the former friends had ever been alone together.
When asked her feelings about friendship reunions, Frankel says, "I like things to be clean and settled and a learning experience and an exploration. And I do not feel that that exploration can accurately be done in a toxic reality show environment where it's being produced by somebody else with the goal of ratings. It doesn't feel like a place to either nurture or mend the relationship, no matter how much the show is trying to pretend that that's what it is about."
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