Hey, everyone. Welcome to Fat Mascara. It's Jess. Hi, Jess. Hi, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. I'm Jen. Oh, my gosh. What a great interview. We have today.

Paulina Puretzkova. I mean, where do we begin? We could have talked to her for like hours more. We could be, we could be talking to her right now.

Like we just had this amazing conversation about like women aging magazine covers relevance like all of this. We need Paulina on the line. Oh, yeah. She I feel like she's going to be my new pundit for like a lot of things. I don't know. I loved her. I loved her.

If you're if you're new to the pod because you want to hear from Paulina welcome Fridays. We do a deep dive interview with someone and today it's Paulina Puretzkova. She's most famously a model probably having worked throughout the 1980s.

Tons of covers pretty much every fashion magazine you've ever heard of Vogue L Harper's Bazaar you name it ad campaigns for Chanel Versace Revlon sports illustrated swimsuit issue covers. She acted. She did a movie and then she was on lots of TV in the arts. She was on America's next top model dancing with the stars.

Now she's a writer. I shouldn't say now though. She's a writer because she wrote a novel back in 2007 called Model Summer. But her first book of essays is coming out now actually just came out on Wednesday.

It reads like a memoir to me. It's called No Filter. She talks a lot about her marriage to Rockstar Rick O'Casek who died in 2019 and actually I found her essays on that topic and topics of like betrayal and love and honesty to be some of some of her best work.

But we're not here to talk to her about that so much as beauty because this is a beauty podcast. So we're going to be focusing on you know her thoughts on beauty. She talks a lot about opting into the or opting out of the whole anti aging beauty world with

Jess and I continue to be fascinated with here at the pod her modeling career. She's just so honest right. Yeah, she's honest. She's fearless. It feels like it was hard one and yeah, I would not mind to grow up acting a little bit like a book titles. Perfect. After having talked to her. No filter is is a great name. And she books find that a little bit in book. So I will link the book in our show notes so that you could check it out as well. It was such a good read.

I like tore through it. I hope you like it. And I hope you enjoy our chat. So here's Paulina.

So Paulina, welcome to Fat Mascara. First of all, hi. Hello. Thank you. Very delighted to be here. So I didn't know this about you before I read your book that you

were famous even before you came became a model. You wrote about this beautifully in your book. But for those who aren't familiar, can you

sort of share how as like as a baby, really, not even a child, you know, you were famous because of a big news case that was going on in

Europe. Can you tell everybody about that? Yeah, I was kind of like the 1970s Ali and Gonzales. If you remember that case with a Cuban refugee child, well, that was me in a way. My parents

left Czechoslovakia when it was being invaded by the Soviets in 1968. I was three years old. And they left me with my grandmother because it was

obviously a dangerous situation to escape. You know, it's not it's not like they were just trotting out with no problems. They were on a on the motorcycle and they were

weaving in and out of tanks and people were getting killed. So and they thought that once they got out, they would be able to get me out. I think they were very young. They

didn't really know any better. What ended up happening, though, is that they got out and the borders closed and they couldn't get me. And they

couldn't come back because they were criminals as you know, for having immigrated and nobody was going to send me out. So my

parents decided to do the only thing they could think of, which was a stage of hunger strike in Stockholm in front of the

Czech embassy to sort of raise awareness of their plight, you know, that we have this little daughter, the communists won't let her go. And they

managed to amass a lot of Swedish sympathy. Eventually, a Swedish newspaper decided to fund a kidnapping of me. They

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