Yvonne Strahovski Is Ready to Decompress After "The Handmaid's Tale"

The Handmaid's Tale" star Yvonne Strahovski is in mourning. After wrapping her final episodes of the hit show, the actor struggles to say farewell to Serena Joy, the character she has inhabited for the past eight years. It's a grief that Strahovski is still figuring out how to process, and since this is her first interview since walking off set, it feels as though she's coming to terms with a "death."

But it's also the first time in close to a decade that the actor will finally have the opportunity to truly "decompress," an opportunity that she plans to take full advantage of by spending time with her family, taking the chance to indulge in some self-care, and hitting the road for a camper van road trip.

It will also be the first time that Strahovski embraces a beauty routine in many years — something that she's had no time to incorporate into her life while balancing her intense filming schedule with her role as a mother to three young sons. "I'm all about pace and being fast because I'm a mom of three boys. I don't get a lot of time to do much of anything else," she says.

Currently, Strahovski's beauty routine consists of one product — two if she's feeling extravagant. So, which sole product has she boiled her regimen down to? The Sahajan Radiance Face Serum ($64) is a clean Ayurvedic product that the on-screen star fell in love with after her makeup artists recommended it. "I'm not a product person. Usually I'd be like, 'Someone else can keep it,'" Strahovski says. "But this time, I looked at the bottle and I thought, 'Oh, this looks interesting.' And I'd heard a little about Ayurvedic [products], but then I read the ingredients and thought, 'This actually sounds like something I would be happy to put on my skin.'"

Sahajan Radiance Face Serum

From

$64

$64 at Amazon

If Strahovski wants to push the boat out, she will add in the Sahajan Balance Toner ($34), although she jokes that the effort of "taking out a cotton pad" will often deter her. While she concedes that her relationship with makeup and skin care has been "complicated" over the years, she has always been incredibly conscious about what she is putting on and in her body, which has helped to clarify her complex thoughts about beauty over the years.

Sahajan Balance Toner

From

$34

$34 at Amazon

"I'm really big on clean anything and everything — whatever I put into my body, food-wise, drink-wise," she says. "We all pick our poisons and make mistakes. It's impossible in this day and age to avoid everything, but our skin is incredibly absorbent, being the largest organ of our body. It absorbs anything and everything. I think we take that for granted."

Strahovski's breezy, one-step beauty routine starkly contrasts to her former ethos, when she felt constrained to adhere to the stereotypes foisted on women in Hollywood. She spent years believing that she had to meet a certain standard — even as she was trying to quietly "reject" the unfair standards women in film were required to meet. "I've had a complicated journey with [beauty] in my lifetime," she says. "There's an expectation — or there used to be — that as an actress you had to be 'pretty' and 'presentable' and 'fashionable.' That part was the part that I rejected, but I still played along because I felt the pressure. It's part of the package deal that you come to find out is part of being an actress. Now, where I've arrived is that it's whatever makes you feel good, whatever you need or want, or however you choose to express yourself."

When she's not in the makeup chair on set, beauty takes a backseat to motherhood. Strahovski reveals that her makeup regimen is similarly pared-back. "There are four things that I slap on my face if I'm running out the door quickly: My Ilia Tru Skin Serum Foundation ($54), a little brow gel, mascara, and a smidge of blush."

Ilia Tru Skin Serum Foundation

From

$54

$54 at Sephora

Charlie Lankston is a freelance beauty, fashion, and lifestyle writer and media strategist based in New York City, having relocated to the US in 2014 from her home in London. Charlie spent 10 years working at DailyMail.com, where she oversaw the website's style, beauty, fashion, and lifestyle content. Charlie also appears as an on-air royal and celebrity correspondent.