One of my favorite gingers of all time, Julianne Moore, is the cover girl for the November issue of Allure Magazine. Julianne turns 50 years old in December, but you wouldn’t know it from these photos. I think Julianne go the cover because the producers of The Kids Are Alright will be making a big awards-show push for Julianne and Annette Bening come awards season. Plus, why not put Julianne on your cover? She’s great! And I would rather see her do model-poses than, say, Blake Lively. And unlike those young girls, Julianne actually has thoughts about things beyond boys and diets. Julianne actually talks honestly about aging and fifty long years as a freckly ginger. God, I love her.

On having to stay out of the sun: “I have what I call ‘my outfit’, I wear a long-sleeved rash guard and a pair of board shorts. It’s not so sexy, but I keep myself covered. My husband hates it. But if you ever see me at a water park, that’s what I’ll be wearing.”

On getting older: “I’m always shocked by people who talk about not being middle-aged, I’m like, ‘How old do you think you’re going to live? Let’s double your age and see where you get.’ People are always like, ‘Thirty-five is not middle-aged.’ I’m like, ‘Double it.’”

On finding herself modeling at age 50: “I like to call myself the hundred-year-old model.”

On plastic surgery: “I hate to condemn people for doing it, but I don’t believe it makes people look better. I think it just makes them look like they had something done to their face, and I don’t think we instinctively find that appealing. We think we do, but then when you look at somebody who’s had their face altered in some way, it just looks weird. We recognize emotionally that that’s not what we look like, that there’s something off. You don’t want to take away what makes a face look human.”

On dyeing her famous ginger hair: She does admit to touching up her signature red hair with a vegetable-based rinse every four weeks, if only because her gray streak has taken on an unusual hue. “Redheads don’t go gray — they go sort of peach, unfortunately,” she explains. “You don’t turn that nice silvery color.”

On her friend Ellen Barkin‘s fashion sense: “She thinks I’m dumpy,” admits Moore. “She doesn’t like my Birkenstocks. She’d hate this outfit that I have on.”

On kissing men vs. women: “I don’t really think it’s different kissing a woman vs. a man. I don’t think it really is. The difference is kissing someone you know versus someone you don’t.”

On her freckles: Seeing herself on billboards and magazine covers is still a surprise to Moore, not just because of her age, but because she grew up being teased about her unusual looks. A children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry (Bloomsbury USA), that she wrote based on that experience was recently turned into a musical. “I don’t love my freckles—I’d really rather not have them, but there’s nothing I can do about them,” says the actress, “I think we learn as adults that there are other things that are more important.”

On the characters she plays: Moore has played a wide range of roles in her career and has been nominated for an Academy Award four times. “Most of the stories I’m attracted to are about people and relationships,” she says. “I haven’t played very many heroic people.”

[Allure excerpts via Allure, Just Jared & Styleist]

“When you look at somebody who’s had their face altered in some way, it just looks weird. We recognize emotionally that that’s not what we look like, that there’s something off. You don’t want to take away what makes a face look human.” I wish I could staple that to Kim Kardashian’s cat-faced forehead. Look at these photos again, and tell me how Julianne looks so amazing while the other ginger, Nicole Kidman, looks like ten kinds of Botoxy hell? Nicole is SEVEN YEARS younger than Julianne. Crazy.

Photos courtesy of Allure & the cover is courtesy of Just Jared.