Everyone, at any age, wants to live a healthy and beautiful life, but some people succeed at it so much, they can buoy up others. Yazemeenah Rossi got her first gray hair at 11, but it didn’t stop her from becoming a model. Now she’s 65 and a sight for sore eyes. She has shared her thoughts about aging, self-acceptance, and beauty, and we agree with every word!

She started her modeling career “by chance” when she was asked to replace a model at the last minute. From that day on she started working with fashion designers like YSL, Jil Sander, and Thierry Mugler. Before her modeling career took off, she was raising her 2 children at home. Yazemeenah always loved her hair and found the first gray threads at puberty,

at 11 years old, and she found it magical to have silver hair. She got a lot of reactions, mostly negative about this, but she always had a deep sense of self-esteem, value, and dignity, and this never affected her.“On the contrary, I was quite proud to stand on what was right for me despite the critics and this has always been like this all my life,

a great asset in fact when I started modeling. Not only by being one of the first models with silver hair but also by standing for what I wanted to do or not, money has never been the thing that would make me do things that felt wrong for me to do.”She believes that self-acceptance is about being connected to common sense and being in awe about the miracle,

that we are as human beings and the wonder that is the human body. Yazemeenah told us that she had a very strong connection to nature and nature’s laws. When asked for beauty secrets, Yazemeenah told us that she is careful of what she puts in her body and on her skin and also in her environment, at home. She uses fresh organic products for food and for her skin (oils).

She’s also very aware of blocking toxic thinking and practicing healthy hygiene, like getting good sleep. When talking about exercise, she shared that she was practicing yoga without knowing it, like being guided from the inside to stretch,

and she feels the benefits of it. For her, exercising is not about going to the gym, it’s about following where her body directs her at the moment. “People, when I was young, though I was a sports teacher or a ballet dancer, [while] it is a way of being in tune with the needs of the body.”