Dolly Parton Was What Great Beauty Looks Like

29.08.2026, 02:12 allure.com

She was Just. So. Darn. Good. Good at writing songs that wrenched the soul. Good at singing them with a voice that was, as she said, “real different.” Good at witty repartee: “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb…and I also know I’m not blonde.” Good at spreading her wealth.

And maybe most surprisingly, good at showing us, once and for all, the profound importance of intention behind our aesthetic choices.

In Dolly Parton’s case—because who else could we be talking about—the aesthetic choices involved the familiar cartoonish physical proportions, along with mile-high cotton-candy hair, fingernails in the extreme, and heels so towering she had to have them handmade, especially for her.

In other words, Dolly was a convenient, if not perfect, target for the kind of finger-pointing and simmering outrage often aimed at other women who seem to have achieved their ultra-feminized figures with injections and surgeries (looking at you, Kim K. and Lauren B.).

Why was she adored rather than vilified? You might say it’s because of the accretion of all of the good she did—likely true. But I think, importantly, it’s also because of Dolly’s relationship to her physical transformation: It was playful, creative, an exercise in extravagance, a loving tribute to the “trashy” character she wanted to be. Her facial and bodily fiddling, as I like to call it, didn’t come from a place of shame or insecurity or self-disparagement.

Dolly Parton at the Steel Magnolias premiere in 1989.

By now you must know that Dolly was born in the Tennessee Smoky Mountains, the fourth of 12 children raised in deep poverty. She often talked about meeting a neighbor with her mother when she was a little girl, a woman who wore makeup and painted her nails and seemed to Dolly the epitome of glamour. When she expressed her admiration, her mother told her “that woman is trash.” “Well, that’s who I want to be when I grow up,” said Dolly.

Much later, having achieved her childhood goal, she said many times: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Her proportions may have been artificial, but there was no artifice in her intention. “Having had plastic surgery is something I am not embarrassed about,” she wrote in Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business. “I have done it and I will do it again when something in my mirror doesn’t look to me like it belongs on Dolly Parton.” Statements like that are another reason her body modifications were received by the public with far more joy, than judgment. She always gave us total, consistent transparency about how they were achieved—often with a cheeky one-liner thrown in, but she also spoke at times about the risks involved in surgery and the fear that comes with it. She never wasted our time with details of her daily water intake, or the miracles of olive oil on middle-aged skin.

On Larry King Live many years ago, Dolly spoke about having had multiple facial surgeries, collagen in her lips, Botox, and other aesthetic procedures. When King asked why she’s so willing to share that information, almost always secreted by a public figure, she said, “Well, because people like you ask me, and I don’t want to lie about it.” Compare that response to the exchange in this magazine a few years ago between incredulous interviewer Danielle Pergament and Kim Kardashian:

Her gaze is unwavering, accentuated by her eyelashes. Insanely long eyelashes. Eyelashes that fan like they’re advertising eyeballs. Her features are almost anime, but were they endowed by our creator or an elite cosmetic dermatologist with a secret entrance on Wilshire Boulevard? Who knows.“What do you have in your face right now?” I ask. I have my theories.

“A little bit of Botox,” she says, pointing to the space between her brows. “But I’ve chilled, actually.”

“No filler?”

“No filler.”

“Your lips and your cheeks? No filler?”

“No filler. Never filled either one, ever.”

“Eyelash extensions.” This I present as a fact, not a question. “No.”

Um, yes. “Yes.”

“No. I’ve never had eyelash extensions. I’ve never done anything. I have a drop of mascara on today. I’ve never filled my cheeks. I’ve never filled my lips.”

Dolly’s authenticity, her openness about where she came from, who she was then, and how it shaped the decisions about how she wanted to look and why, made her extreme enhancement not only acceptable, but gave us permission to appreciate it.

A portrait of Dolly Parton in 1989.

Last year, I wrote a piece for this magazine after we were all deluged with photos of Kris Jenner’s new face. I felt I needed to remind everyone, myself included: No 69-year-old looks like Kris Jenner in real life. Not even Kris Jenner. In her public presentations, Dolly’s surgeries and wigs certainly defied her age—but she was the one giving us the reality check, reminding us in interviews that her public-facing self was not what she looked like without the makeup and the lighting. Once asked if her husband Carl Dean ever worried about holding on to such a striking woman, she laughed, “Oh no, because he knows what I really look like.” No one looks like Dolly. Not even Dolly. And she wanted us to understand that.

Dolly's greatest legacy is existential in nature. “Piling on wigs and feathers, she showed that you can be yourself while playing a character,” wrote Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic. Dolly Parton was never apologetic about her aesthetic choices, whether in cup size or colors. In a 2020 video she made with Allure she said, “I like a lot of makeup, daytime or nighttime. And I like colors. And a lot of people say, ‘Oh, don’t wear blue eye shadow.’ I said, ‘But I like blue eye shadow. I don’t care if it’s fashionable.’ They said, 'Don't buy a blue car.' I like blue cars too. Blue's blue, I love blue.”

Dolly Parton in 2023, during halftime at a Dallas Cowboys game.

But Dolly's authenticity didn’t stop with her; she encouraged it in a way that few other celebrities have the courage to do. She used the character she created as a platform for declaring her values. “I’ll do what’s best for me, as everybody should,” she told Allure in response to a 2021 interview question about her approach to aging. She was unconditionally accepting of other people’s choices, aesthetic and otherwise. “A true American beauty is a person who loves everybody regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation,” she said in Allure’s American Beauty issue in 2017. “In today’s crazy world, we need more love and less hate. If everyone respects one another, the world would be a much better place.”

The world was a much better place with Dolly in it. Someone once asked her what she wanted people to say about her 100 years from now. “Boy, does she look good for her age,” she replied.

And boy, did she.

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