Move over, French girls.
Italian girls are the new bombshell beauty ideal.
Yes, it’s time to trade dark eyeliner and baguettes for a heaping bowl of pasta.
So says writer Kamin Mohammadi in her new book about Italian beauty, “Bella Figura: How to Live, Love and Eat the Italian Way” (Knopf).
Not that she’s trying to knock French femmes, exactly. “French women are very rightly celebrated.
They have this wonderful combination of kittenish sexiness,” she tells The Post. “But they can be quite unapproachable.”
In contrast, Italian women are “voluptuous, outwards, laughing,” the 48-year-old writer says. More Sophia Loren than Brigitte Bardot — and it’s all due to their laid-back, olive oil-soaked lifestyles.
Though Mohammadi is originally from Iran and lived in London for most of her life, she moved to Italy in her 30s and experienced a total mind-body makeover.
Her book details how she went from being an overworked magazine editor to a glowing stunner who, at one point, caused three men to crash their mopeds into a bridge just by smiling at them.
The writer moved in 2008, after taking a redundancy buyout from her company.
She stayed in a friend’s flat in Florence, Italy, while working on a book. Physically, she wasn’t in a great place.
“When I arrived [in Florence], I was overweight, I had adult acne and I had this sallowness from working under fluorescent lights for so many years,” she tells The Post.
But that changed quickly.
Food played a big part in her transformation: She was on a budget, but she didn’t turn to fast-food fixes or ramen noodles.
Instead, she bought small amounts of food at the open-air market — and pasta, a delicious, cheap staple.
Following the advice of her new Italian friends, she began downing copious amounts of extra virgin olive oil — sometimes by the spoonful, or over luxuriant mounds of spaghetti and fresh vegetables.
Her skin cleared up almost immediately. It was as if the wear and tear of her stressful life “got scrubbed off,” she says.
In fact, she was looking prettier all over.
She was walking everywhere, and shedding weight as she stepped.
On the advice of an Italian friend, she practiced “self care,” finding small ways to make everything in her life just a little more beautiful: She made her meals extra-picturesque and put on shimmery lip gloss every day. “My friends [would walk around town with] the glitter from my lip gloss on their cheeks!”
Most of all, the stress that had hampered her appearance for so many years was hard to hang onto in a country that lives life slowly and deliberately.
“Whatever is happening in their day, whatever calamity, you can go out for an aperitivo, watch the sunset and know that hour you just spent, that’s the dolce vita,” she says.
Hard to feel stressed and ugly reading that.
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