Originally appeared on E! Online
You'll love Jennifer Love Hewitt's empowering message on aging.
The "I Know What You Did Last Summer" star shared that the fan reaction to her dramatic new hair transformation in August taught her an important lesson. As she put it, "Aging is Hollywood is really hard. You can't do anything right."
Case in point? "I was getting my hair done and I had not a stitch of makeup on," Hewitt, 44, said on a recent episode of the "Inside of You" podcast. "So, I threw on a filter. I really gave it no thought."
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But the photo blew up on social media. As she recalled, "A bunch of people were like, ‘Jennifer Love Hewitt is unrecognizable.' ‘She's unrecognizable, so she's gone to filters because she doesn't want us to know how bad she actually looks now in her 40s.'"
"This is crazy, right?" noted the "Ghost Whisperer" alum, who at the time responded by "trying to make fun of it," posting photos with what she called "over the top" filters on her face.
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"So many people said I look different," she captioned the Instagram pics in September. "I look the same as always. Couldn't look more natural...Filters don't change you that much."
But according to Hewitt, her joke only fanned the flames.
"They were like, ‘Well, now she's just defending herself and why is she defending?'" she recalled. "I realized I can do no right."
And while she would love to just ignore the trolls, the actress kept it real by admitting that she does pay attention to what people say: "To pretend that we don't is a lie."