She’s an actress, an agitator and a ceaseless campaigner for worth-it older women. Now, in what many see as the culmination of a brilliant career, Jane Fonda is to donate her total skin area to a grateful nation. In addition to her career as an actress, Fonda gained fame in the 1960’s as a dermo-activist, taking much needed moisturisers and cleansing lotions to the women of war torn Vietnam.
The skin is thought to measure around .63 square metres, excluding naturally occurring holes. Since 1937 it has been the outer layer of one of the most famous people in the world. It has been stretched by exercise videos, tanned by the California sun, lit by Hollywood’s finest cameramen, all the while slowly shedding its lifeless outer layer into the celebrity bedrooms of Roger Vadim and Ted Turner.
But in a surprise move, Fonda announced from her Laboratoire Garnier home yesterday that she will start donating the skin in batches next week, donating up to 0.3 square metres at a time to Washington’s Smithsonian Museum. This raises the possibility that Fonda could end up being the world’s first skinless movie star within two years. It is understood the first donated skin will come from her elbows. “You have to start somewhere, it doesn’t matter where” she joked at a specially sterilised press-conference in Geneva. “It’s no skin off my nose. Not yet, anyway!”
