Welcome to Skin Talk With Laura Love, our video series in which stars of fashion, film, television, and beyond share their beauty secrets with the licensed model and esthetician.
The fifth episode of our first season of Skin Talk With Laura Love features actress Phoebe Tonkin, who lugs her hefty Chanel makeup case and plunks it onto the Skin Talk table to spill her deepest beauty secrets. The Australian star—who made a name for herself as a teen in H20: Just Add Water, and went on to beloved roles in The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and Netflix’s Boy Swallows Universe—shares her step-by-step morning and night skincare routine, including her desert-island products. Among them: Augustinus Bader’s The Rich Cream, The Jasmine Garden by May Lindstrom (“I use it as aromatherapy as well as just [being] on top of my skincare because it smells so good,” Tonkin says), and a surprise under-eye serum that can be found in her medicine cabinet—castor oil.
The Sydney native reveals the cosmetic procedures she’s done, including PRP injections, microneedling (“But I hate needles,” she says), and lasers, which she admits she started using far too early. “I think I was 21, and I don’t know why someone told me to get a laser that young,” she recalls. “I looked like I’d been in a house fire.”
Of course, Love inquires about the details of Tonkin’s onscreen career, from her beginnings as a kid who simply loved acting and sought out after-school drama classes. “I don’t have family members who are in the industry,” Tonkin says, “so it didn’t feel like it was something tangible. And then when I booked a job, I was 16. I was like, ‘This is something I can do forever.’” Having played a witch, a werewolf/vampire, and a mermaid, Tonkin shares which supernatural character resonates with her the most: “A witch, but a good witch, making potions in the kitchen as skincare,” she says. In the words of Love, “a skincare witch.”
Be sure to tune in every other week as the likes of Carolyn Murphy, Paloma Elsesser, Devon Lee Carlson, Karen Elson, and more slip into the cozy W robe to chat all things skincare and beauty with Love. Subscribe to W’s YouTube channel to catch every episode.