The effects of aging are only amplified when your adolescent image is immortalized on a screen. Charlize Theron, who began modeling at age 16 and acted in her first film at age 20, knows this well.

The actress, now 48, recently spoke to Allure about embracing aging. While she noted that she “love[s] that [her] face is changing and aging,” she also pointed out that “people think [she] had a facelift.”

“They’re like, ‘What did she do to her face?’” she explained to the outlet. “I’m like, ‘Bitch, I’m just aging! It doesn’t mean I got bad plastic surgery. This is just what happens.’”

She also touched on the way men are perceived to age “like fine wines,” while the aging process for women is described as resembling that of “cut flowers.”

“I despise that concept and I want to fight against it, but I also think women want to age in a way that feels right to them,” she said.

The aging process has not only influenced Theron’s own self-image, but also the roles which she intends to take going forward.

“I will never, ever do a movie again and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll gain 40 pounds,’” she told the outlet. “I will never do it again because you can’t take it off.”

She discussed how she gained weight for the 2003 crime drama Monster — when she was just 27 — and “lost 30 pounds, like, overnight” following production. However, this was not the case when she had to gain weight at age 43 for the 2018 dramedy Tully.

“I remember a year into trying to lose the weight, I called my doctor and I said, ‘I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight,’” she remembered. “And he was like, ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was.’ Nobody wants to hear that.”

Additionally, aging has interfered with her ability to film action movies in the way she used to, as she “take[s] way longer to heal than [she] did in [her] 20s.”

“More than my face, I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow,” she continued.

Nonetheless, Theron seems to have learned from her young daughters to accept and find comfort in her aging body, as she shared that they “have no concept of what age is like.”

“They see somebody, they like what they’re wearing, or they think they’re pretty and they don’t really know if she’s in her 20s or she’s in her 60s,” she said. “It’s so great. I love that. I wish we could just maintain that.”