Stevie Nicks' Four-Word Advice To Her Younger Friends Highlights Her Healthy Approach To Aging

Stevie Nicks is many things: a legendary songwriter, a whirlwind of a performer, and a wearer of a truly mind-boggling number of shawls. She's also, in her late 70s, what your grandpa might call "one heck of a looker." In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, she was asked how she feels about the public perception of her beauty.

"Of course I thought that I was very pretty," she said, because she has eyes. However, she described her position as best summarized by an unreleased song she wrote called "Prettiest Girl in the World." Its opening lyrics are, "She was the prettiest girl in the world, but that was a long time ago," Nicks revealed.

"That's something that I have said to a lot of my younger friends: No matter how beautiful you are, you're going to get older, and you're not going to look like you did when you were 25," Nicks continued. She recounted one disastrous encounter with Botox that made her swear off the procedure for the rest of her days and shared the empowering take on aging she has for young women: "Roll with the punches."

In the same interview, Stevie Nicks mused on her reason for being childless by choice, but that decision doesn't mean she's not a nurturing figure. In fact, she opted for a life in the studio and on the road because she knew the songs she recorded with Fleetwood Mac were "going to heal so many people's hearts and make people so happy." Nicks has always had that inner depth and her favorite books are all about dark romance. In 2019, she told Rolling Stone that she feels like she has a lot of daughters, from the girls in her extended family, to the current slate of pop stars who look to her for inspiration, as well as the generations of women who have found bottomless comfort in her voice and words.

She takes care of these daughters, too. She told Rolling Stone that she has a vault of stage wear, including thousands of those aforementioned shawls, that she keeps in museum condition — though she doesn't want them locked away in some stuffy storeroom forever. She plans to leave much of it to her "little goddaughters and nieces," but she's making an active effort to disperse her shawl collection among anyone who wants them, joking that the story of her life would bear the title, "There's Enough Shawls to Go Around." Um, Stevie? Where can we sign up?