Crystal Hefner Revealed How Hugh Hefner’s Strict Beauty Rules From Their Marriage Still Affect Her

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Hugh Hefner died in 2017, but the Playboy magazine founder’s legacy has had a reckoning since his passing. Now, his third wife, Crystal Hefner, is spilling what her life was like behind the Playboy Mansion walls in a new memoir, Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself. 

At 37, Crystal has a much different perspective of her marriage to Hugh after his passing and her memoir, which was her late husband’s idea, is almost chilling now. “I want you to continue my legacy going forward…and I want to remind you to only say good things about me,” she claimed in an interview with People. Her union with the controversial figure still has lingering effects on her psyche, especially when it comes to beauty standards. Hef had strict rules and Crystal has done her best to shake them over the years. 

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In order for Hef’s girlfriends to maintain their look, he doled out a cash “allowance” that he ordered them to spend on their beauty appointments. “Our nail polish couldn’t be anything but some neutral color, no French manicure,” Crystal noted. “He would tell me ‘Wear the flag.’ That’s the Playboy logo and those shirts were uncomfortable and cheap.” When it came to her hair, the author was responsible for keeping the bleach-blond Playboy trend alive. 

Crystal revealed that Hugh would always notice her dark roots as they started to grow in — that meant a swift visit to the beauty salon. “So I’d have to go bleach it and it would burn my scalp and I’d have blisters,” she said. “But for some reason I thought this was all normal and that’s what it meant to be seen as beautiful in Hef’s eyes.” Even though Hef has been gone almost seven years, Crystal has had a hard time shaking his strict rules, they still stick in her head. She’s had to almost deprogram her brain from thinking that a belly button ring is “trashy” because that was his opinion, not hers.

While Crystal is not friends with some of Hef’s former girlfriends, including Holly Madison, she backed up the Playboy model’s claims in A&E’s Secrets of Playboy docuseries that he blackmailed women with “all kinds of naked pictures.” Crystal revealed her then-Twitter account, “I found thousands of those disposable camera photos you are talking about @hollymadison,” she wrote in 2022. “I immediately ripped them up and destroyed every single one of them for you and the countless other women in them. They’re gone.”

It’s a show of solidarity that things were not right at the Playboy Mansion and so many women suffered at the hands of a very complicated pop-culture figure.

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Before you go, click here to see all the celebrity women who have posed for Playboy.