Salma Hayek's Acne Problems Made Her Fat And Depressed

How the Hollywood star was once down and out.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Before she became one of the prettiest faces in Hollywood, Salma Hayek was just a 25-year old struggling actress who had left a soap opera in Mexico to try become a movie star in America. Things weren't really working out. She tells Lucky that her skin may have been one of the reasons why.

"I had acne," she says. "And this acne was so bad, it sent me into a severe, severe depression. Like I couldn’t leave the house. I’d wake up in the morning and lie there and touch my face before I got up, just to prepare myself to look in the mirror!"

One of the serious downsides of depression (no pun intended), is that it one thing can steamroll into another and exacerbate the situation. That's what happened to Hayek.

“The next stage with that sort of depression is food: too little, or too much," sh says. "Guess what I did? I mean, I was fat and broken out, I couldn’t leave the house and I couldn’t pay the rent!”

Hayek says that her friend, director, Alfonso Cuarón, is the person who practically saved her.

"He did not play it down," she says. "He did not try to say, 'Oh you look fine.' He said 'you can’t do this to yourself,' and [he] taught me to meditate, relax. I got myself back together!”

Then she started using Accutane (since taken off the market, now dubbed Roaccutane), a powerful medication used for treating severe cases of acne.

“I didn’t want to," Hayek says, "but it cured it. Since then my skin’s forever sensitive and dry.”

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