Sharing an open and candid conversation between friends, Afua Hirsch and Naomie Harris took to the stage on day one of Stylist Live to chat all things beauty, history and ancestry. Afua Hirsch is a broadcaster and journalist, and last month, she published her new book, Decolonising My Body, which is about unpacking and unlearning myths surrounding beauty and body image. The writer was chatting to her friend, the actor Naomie Harris (Moonlight, Skyfall), who has recently collaborated with sustainable fashion brand Omnes.

The pair have been friends for over 20 years, with Hirsch telling the Stylist Live crowd that Harris was one of the first people to read Decolonising My Body.

Opening up about the inspiration behind the book, Hirsch said: “We live in a society that’s constantly telling us that beauty, value and status are all connected to being young. And so, as we get older, we feel the pressure that we’re becoming less beautiful and less interesting. So it’s natural that many women would respond to that by trying to prolong the appearance of youth. But I just had this epiphany when I turned 40, where I realised that I regarded it as completely socially acceptable to go under a surgeon’s knife to operate on my body to try to look younger than I am.”

She went on to tell Harris and the crowd: “But to mark my body in the way my female ancestors had, in a way that connects me to my community, to my history, that denotes my role and my value as a storyteller, that celebrates ageing as a process – I regarded that as backwards.”

For Hirsch, this was a moment when she realised she had done so much work during her career challenging colonial, racist and unfair ideas, but hadn’t been applying those same ideas to her own body.

The friends also talked about Hirsch’s vulnerability in Decolonising My Body and the intentionality behind this. “I hadn’t really given myself permission to be the person that I needed to be for this book – to talk openly about my struggles with my intimate self. If there’s one thing to take from this book, it’s that we are the products of our conditioning, and I’ve worked hard to unpick that conditioning. This isn’t a book that tells you what choices you should make about your body. It’s completely judgment-free.”

“Society constantly tells us that beauty, value and status is all connected to being young”: a candid conversation with Afua Hirsch and Naomie Harris