“Tommy did my makeup”: Pamela Anderson on her iconic '90s looks and going makeup-free at the Fashion Awards

Pamela Anderson would like to rebrand ageing. “I’m ageing, we’re all ageing. Chasing this youth thing doesn’t seem to work,” she says. “We’re all going to get old, so it’s just changing the perception and maybe calling it life-ing instead of ageing.” The 56-year-old icon and activist is sitting in an opulent suite at the Lanesborough Hotel in London, just hours before she presents Pandora’s ‘Leader of Change’ award to British actor and writer Michaela Coel (Anderson herself is an ambassador for the Danish jewellery brand, which is the title sponsor of this year’s ceremony).

But unlike most other women who walked the red carpet yesterday evening, Anderson did not spend the bulk of her afternoon in the makeup chair. Rather, she’s opted to continue to embrace her natural beauty – embrace life-ing, really – by attending the awards show makeup free, a headline-making decision she first took rather spontaneously during last Paris Fashion Week.

Related: Pamela Anderson is Finnish – really! Here’s everything you need to know

“I was in Paris and I thought, ‘I really don’t want to sit in the glam chair for three hours. I want to go for a walk’,” Anderson recalls. Her team was sceptical. “You can’t cancel glam,” they told her. But Anderson was adamant. She was done playing the game. It wasn’t some big political statement or, as she puts it, “it’s not that it’s world peace”, but rather her own little rebellion – an act of bravery to inspire other women, specifically her nieces and her sons’ girlfriends. “I just felt I’m OK with this and my little head sticking out of all these great clothes,” she says. “It was a leap of faith.” She even cancelled her stylist, though you won’t know it by the effortlessly stunning off-white Stella McCartney suit she’s wearing.

It’s a fitting choice, given that Anderson’s most enduring looks were realised without the help of a team. “We’re all so used to being surrounded by teams of stylists and glam and stuff, but I remember when I was getting ready back in the '90s, I had no stylist,” she says. “Tommy did my makeup.” She’s the first to admit not all the looks were smash hits – there were feather boas and big fuzzy hats, corsets and messy up-dos. But her fashion moments have cemented themselves in the culture, coming back as Halloween costumes and popping up on moodboards. “No stylist would let me out the door wearing any of them,” she says. “But we had a ball – we were having a good time.” Luckily these days she has pals like Victoria Beckham who are more than happy to lend her a look fresh off the runway.

So what does Anderson do with all of her extra time? Go for long walks, mostly. Earlier that afternoon she took a stroll through a drizzly Hyde Park. She saw a labradoodle “really pissing off” some ducks and swans. “They all left squawking,” she says with a smile. “I need to see other life, not just people,” she says. “But I like people – I’m happy to be part of the human family, I guess.” If she could be part of another sort of family, she reckons she’d be a golden retriever.

It’s unsurprising that Anderson has such an inherent connection to nature – after all, she’s one quarter Finnish. “My grandfather spoke Finnish to me until he passed away when I was 11,” says Anderson, noting that today, however, she “can’t tell you a word”. “He was a logger who danced on the top of the tree tops. He used to say the trees spoke to him and he told me where the gnome villages were buried and the elves and not to disrupt them. So I’ve always been very connected to nature and mythology and fairytales.” Today Anderson lives on her grandpa’s old property on Vancouver Island with a brood of dogs and animals. Some of the trees have known her “since birth”. “It’s such a powerful thing to have a relationship with trees and nature and the ocean,” she says.

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With a lifetime of activism and bold moves behind her (“30 years ago when I was asking people to be more sustainable and make bottles out of corn, people thought I was crazy,” she says), becoming the makeup-free face of Pandora was an apt choice. The brand is steeped in sustainability values and is a pioneer in the lab-grown diamond space. She’s particularly thrilled that her ambassadorship led her to meet Coel, a woman she describes as “a force of nature." “I feel this kinship with her,” Anderson says. “She’s a really powerful woman – she just vibrates.”

So will Anderson ever re-hire her glam team? She doesn’t plan to. “It’s been really freeing. I’m not trying to be the prettiest girl in the room. And when does it end, by the way. I’m almost 60 – am I going to be wearing this much makeup for the rest of my life?” She says. “I wanted to peel it back and find out what I’m going to be next. You kind of have to live with yourself and feel like, ‘I’m OK with this. I’m good’.”