Actress and model Anne Watanabe has spent many years in the public eye while raising three children and building a life that now takes her between Paris and Tokyo. She began working internationally in fashion as a teenager and later established herself as an actress, while also becoming known for her love of cooking, reading, running, hiking, walking her dog, and finding enjoyment in everyday life.
Born in Tokyo on April 14, 1986, Anne began her modeling career in 2001 and went on to work internationally, including on the Paris fashion scene. She later expanded into acting, appearing in numerous television dramas and films, including the NHK morning drama Gochisousan, the Hanasaki Mai Speaks Out series, Competition's Guardian, Kingdom 3: The Flame of Destiny, and Kakushigoto.
In 2022, she became a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). That same year, she relocated to Paris with her three children and has since continued her acting career while dividing her time between France and Japan.
In her personal life, Anne married actor Masahiro Higashide in 2015. Their twin daughters were born in 2016, followed by a son in 2017. The couple divorced in 2020, and Anne is now raising their three children, all of whom are elementary-school age in 2026.
In 2025, Anne spent around three months in Finland with her children and dog while filming the Japan-Finland co-production WOWOW Serial Drama W: BLOOD & SWEAT. The drama was released in 2026, a year in which she also published essays reflecting on life in Paris and time with her children.
Anne turned 40 in April 2026. From her international modeling years in her teens and twenties to a busy acting career, raising three children, relocating to Paris, and spending several months in Finland, her approach to beauty, health, food, exercise, sleep, and self-care has continued to evolve alongside her life.
What stands out is the simplicity of many of her habits: moisturizing, drinking water, using sun protection, walking, cooking, taking baths, sleeping well, and making room for things she genuinely enjoys.
Here, we take a closer look at Anne Watanabe’s skincare and moisturizing habits, sun protection, vitamins and hydration, running, hiking, strength training and stretching, her diet and love of cooking, sleep, baths and sauna, self-care, parenting three children, life in Paris, and the importance she now places on creating “space” in her life at 40.
Anne Watanabe’s Skincare Routine | Moisturizing, Sun Protection and Hydration at 40
Looking across Anne’s beauty routine over the years, one theme appears repeatedly: moisture.
Speaking about skincare in 2022, Anne explained that keeping her skin moisturized was something she valued throughout the year, regardless of the season.
At the time, she was in the middle of raising three young children. After a bath, there was rarely time to devote herself entirely to a long skincare routine.
Her practical solution was simple: apply toner to her own skin first, then help her children get into their pajamas.
By taking care of that first skincare step before turning her attention back to parenting, she was able to make moisturizing part of the natural rhythm of family life.
💡 Toner First, Then Pajamas
Even during the busiest years of raising three children, Anne would apply toner immediately after getting out of the bath before helping her children change into their pajamas. It was a simple way to build skincare into an already busy routine.
Her skincare also extended beyond her face. Anne has spoken about treating her neck and décolletage as part of the same moisturizing area, rather than stopping at the jawline.
She also adjusted her routine according to how much time she had available.
On busy evenings, she could keep things simple and quickly apply toner. When she had more time after her children had gone to sleep, she might slow down and massage her skin as part of her skincare routine.
💡 Skincare From Face to Décolletage
Anne’s moisturizing routine extends to her neck and décolletage. She adapts the amount of time she spends on skincare to her schedule, keeping it brief on busy days and taking more time when her evening allows.
Seasonal changes also influence her approach to beauty and wellness.
As spring moves into summer, she has spoken about incorporating sunscreen, paying attention to vitamins, and enjoying seasonal foods.
Another everyday habit she consciously works on is drinking water and tea regularly.
Anne has said that frequent hydration does not always come naturally to her, which is why she makes a conscious effort to remember it. She also reminds her children to drink water and checks their water bottles before they leave for school.
Similarly, encouraging her children to think about eating vegetables gives her an opportunity to reflect on her own eating habits as well.
💡 Family Reminders Become Her Own Wellness Reminders
Encouraging her children to drink water and think about vegetables also gives Anne a natural reminder to check in with her own daily habits. Parenting and wellness have become closely connected in her everyday life.
Bathing and sleep are also part of the broader way Anne thinks about beauty.
She has said that after a day when she has been able to soak properly in the bath or get enough sleep, she personally notices a difference in how her skin appears the following morning. This is Anne’s own experience, but it illustrates how broadly she views beauty care: skincare products are only one part of her overall routine.
From her twenties as an international model to her thirties raising three children and now life between Paris and Tokyo at 40, Anne’s approach centers on making moisturizing, sun protection, hydration, food, bathing, and sleep sustainable parts of everyday life.
Anne Watanabe’s Exercise Routine | Running, Hiking, Strength Training, Stretching and Walking
Physical activity has been part of Anne’s life for many years.
In her twenties, she enjoyed running and hiking. Alongside her work as a model and actress, spending time outdoors and moving her body became something she genuinely enjoyed.
💡 Running and Hiking Since Her Twenties
Anne’s interest in exercise goes back many years. Running and hiking were already part of her lifestyle in her twenties, giving her an active outlet away from work.
Her acting career has also occasionally required more specific physical preparation.
For the 2013 drama CLAMP Drama xxxHOLiC, Anne undertook strength training as part of preparing for her character. She also changed her weight by around two to three kilograms at the time as she worked to approach the silhouette and atmosphere of the original character.
This was preparation for a specific acting role rather than a general fitness recommendation.
In everyday life, Anne also pays attention to stretching her back and waist.
Because of her height, she has said that she often finds herself leaning forward in daily situations. This has made her more conscious of posture and of stretching areas such as her back and waist in ways that suit her own body.
💡 Stretching With Her Height in Mind
Anne has spoken about becoming more conscious of her posture because her height can leave her leaning forward in everyday situations. Stretching her back and waist is one of the ways she pays attention to her own physical needs.
By 2026, at age 40, one of her most characteristic everyday forms of movement is much simpler: her morning walk with her dog.
When she has enough time, she walks farther and may occasionally break into a light jog. She also changes the music she listens to, giving a familiar daily routine a slightly different feeling from one day to the next.
During periods of intense heat in Paris, she has taken her dog out in the cooler early morning hours, allowing them to enjoy a proper walk before the day becomes hotter.
💡 At 40: Walking With a Little Jogging
Her morning dog walk is one of Anne’s favorite ways to enjoy movement. When time allows, she extends the route, adds a little jogging, or changes her music to keep the familiar routine fresh.
As she entered her forties, Anne also spoke about wanting to pay closer attention to nutrition and exercise so that she can continue living energetically.
From running and hiking in her twenties to strength training for a role, everyday stretching, and morning dog walks at 40, her exercise habits have evolved with her circumstances while preserving one important element: she continues to find forms of movement that fit her life and that she can enjoy.
Anne Watanabe’s Diet and Cooking | Seasonal Food and a Simpler Paris Lifestyle
Cooking has long been an important part of Anne’s life.
She regularly shares cooking on her YouTube channel and enjoys both eating and making food. She has even described tasting dishes while dining out and wondering whether she might be able to recreate them at home.
She also enjoys incorporating seasonal ingredients into her meals.
Her approach is centered on enjoying good food when it is in season. She has also spoken about being mindful of vitamins during spring and summer, making food another part of her broader everyday beauty and wellness routine.
Moving to Paris in 2022 gradually changed the way she approached cooking at home.
One thing she noticed in France was the relative simplicity of weekday meals.
Speaking in 2026 about breakfast at home, Anne explained that on weekdays family members may choose what they want for themselves, such as yogurt or fruit.
Compared with periods when she might prepare miso soup or cook over the stove in the morning, breakfast has evolved into a more relaxed arrangement in which everyone can choose something that suits them that day.
💡 Breakfast Became Simpler in Paris
Even for someone who loves cooking, Anne’s weekday meals became more relaxed after moving to Paris. Breakfast may be as simple as each family member choosing yogurt, fruit, or another food they feel like eating.
She saves more time-consuming cooking for weekends when the family has a little more time.
On weekdays, she is comfortable using prepared foods or ingredients that can simply be cut and served. On weekends, she can spend longer in the kitchen. Rather than giving up cooking, she has created a clearer rhythm around when to keep meals simple and when to enjoy the process.
Cooking is also a form of refreshment for Anne.
She enjoys repetitive, absorbing activities such as wrapping gyoza and thinking about how to recreate restaurant dishes at home.
One particularly charming detail is that Anne has said she tends to hum when she has some emotional breathing room.
She may naturally start singing while cooking, prompting reactions from her children along the lines of, “Mom’s singing again.” When she has even more room to relax, she may pick up her guitar.
💡 Humming in the Kitchen Is a Sign She Has Some Breathing Room
Anne has said that humming around the house tends to happen when she has some emotional space. With even more time to herself, she may reach for her guitar. Cooking, music, and family life naturally overlap in her home.
Life with three growing children also creates some very practical—and memorable—food stories.
In 2026, Anne revealed that her three children can go through around four to five liters of milk in a week.
Living in Paris without relying on a car means that unexpected grocery runs for milk, detergent, and other household necessities can sometimes involve carrying substantial loads in a backpack. It is an everyday glimpse of Anne not as an actress or model, but simply as a mother managing life with three children.
💡 Three Children, Four to Five Liters of Milk a Week
Anne has shared that her three children can drink around four to five liters of milk each week—a small detail that vividly captures the reality of grocery shopping for a family of four in Paris.
Seasonal ingredients, simple weekday meals, leisurely weekend cooking, and the occasional song in the kitchen all reflect the same approach: enjoy food and cooking while shaping meals around the realities of family life.
Anne Watanabe’s Sleep, Baths, Sauna and Self-Care | Making Time to Switch Off
As Anne has grown older, one element has become increasingly prominent in the way she talks about beauty and wellness: time to rest.
In 2022, when asked what helped her remain natural and comfortable in herself, she shared the memorable idea of making an effort not to overdo things.
Even amid acting work and raising three children, she looks for small opportunities to pause: sitting down while tea is brewing, allowing herself a moment to do nothing, or choosing an earlier night when she feels she needs more rest.
Rather than filling her schedule with elaborate self-care rituals, she makes room for small periods of rest within an already busy day.
💡 Making an Effort Not to Overdo Things
Even during busy periods of work and parenting, Anne values small opportunities to pause—such as sitting while tea is brewing. Her approach to self-care includes noticing when she needs rest and allowing herself to take it.
Her acting career also gives sleep a particular importance.
Filming can involve early mornings, late finishes, and changing schedules. Anne has spoken about valuing sleep precisely because her working hours can vary so much.
During filming, there can also be days when the tension of work makes it harder for her to settle into sleep. At such times, she may use a sequence of bathing, stretching, and then going to bed as a way of shifting from work mode into rest.
She also checks in with herself from day to day, thinking along the lines of “I should pay more attention to nutrition today” or “I should rest earlier tonight.”
For Anne, wellness management is therefore less about repeating an identical routine every day and more about noticing what she needs and making small adjustments.
Bathing has remained another valued part of her routine.
As she has described it, after nights when she has been able to soak properly in the bath and sleep well, she sometimes personally notices a difference in the appearance of her skin the next morning.
Her 2025 stay in Finland also introduced a new favorite: sauna.
Anne has said that she was not previously someone who actively sought out saunas. After enjoying them during roughly three months in Finland, however, she became fond enough of the experience that she now looks for opportunities to visit saunas when they arise.
💡 Finland Turned Her Into a Sauna Fan
Anne was not particularly proactive about visiting saunas before living in Finland. After experiencing Finnish sauna culture during her extended stay, it became something she began looking forward to.
At 40, she has also developed a clearer boundary around her evenings.
After her three children have gone to bed, she has roughly one hour for herself. Recently, she has enjoyed spending some of that time on jigsaw puzzles and other activities that allow her to focus quietly.
She previously sometimes continued working before bed, but now prefers to use the evening as a period for relaxation. She may also stretch when she remembers, creating a clearer transition between work and rest.
Anne also likes to give herself small things to look forward to outside work.
On a demanding filming day, for example, she might think, “When filming is over, I’ll have something delicious to eat.” Rather than waiting for a major reward, she creates small pleasures within ordinary days.
💡 Something Delicious After Filming
Food, cooking, puzzles, walks, and other small pleasures give Anne things to look forward to beyond work. They are simple ways of creating moments she genuinely enjoys within everyday life.
Baths, sauna, stretching, sleep, puzzles, good food, and moments of doing very little all fit within Anne’s broader approach to noticing her own condition and creating time when she can comfortably switch away from work.
Marriage, Three Children and Life in Paris | How Anne Watanabe’s Lifestyle Changed in Her 30s and 40s
To understand Anne’s current approach to beauty and wellness, it is also useful to look at the major changes that shaped her thirties: marriage, raising three children, and moving overseas.
Anne married actor Masahiro Higashide in 2015. Their twin daughters were born in 2016 and their son in 2017. The couple divorced in 2020, and Anne is now raising their three children.
She has spoken about how different the three children can be in their interests and strengths despite growing up in the same family. She therefore values seeing them as individuals and sometimes creates opportunities to spend one-on-one time with each child.
In 2022, Anne relocated to Paris with her three children.
France was already familiar territory. She had spent time in Paris during her international modeling career as a teenager and already had friends and acquaintances there.
One attraction of living in Paris, she has explained, is the easy access to many different European countries and cultures.
Travel from France can quickly bring the family into contact with different languages and ways of life in places such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. For Anne, raising her children in an environment where they can encounter different cultures is part of the appeal of European life.
Living there also gradually changed her own routines. Weekday meals became simpler, she experienced a culture in which people help one another with childcare, and she encountered different attitudes toward work and time off.
In a 2026 interview, Anne reflected that exposure to different cultures and perspectives in Paris had helped soften some of her own ideas about how things “should” be.
Cooking, working, resting, and family life could all be adjusted to suit the circumstances in front of her. That flexibility is also visible throughout her beauty and wellness habits.
Her move to Paris also influenced the way she communicates with her audience.
As she considered spending less time in front of cameras in Tokyo, platforms such as YouTube and Instagram became places where she could shape and share things she personally enjoyed, including cooking, everyday life, and experiences abroad.
Then, in 2025, Anne traveled with her children and dog to Finland, where they spent around three months during filming for WOWOW Serial Drama W: BLOOD & SWEAT.
One aspect of the production environment that impressed her was the clearer separation of working hours. Work was completed within defined periods, leaving time afterward for family, personal maintenance, study, and other parts of life.
💡 Three Months in Finland With Her Children and Dog
Extended overseas filming can be complicated while raising three children. For BLOOD & SWEAT, an environment was created that allowed Anne to bring her children and dog, enabling the family to spend roughly three months together in Finland.
Her children and dog delighted in the snowy landscape, while Anne has joked about how even seeing frozen surfaces could lift her mood. On days off, she also enjoyed visiting secondhand shops and searching for tableware like a small treasure hunt.
Anne has even described herself as a “maximalist” rather than a minimalist. She enjoys being surrounded by books, manga, tableware, and cooking tools, and when choosing something new, she likes to imagine herself actually using it.
By 2026, roughly four years after relocating, her children had become increasingly accustomed to school and everyday life in France, and Anne spoke about finally feeling that their family life in Paris was settling into a workable rhythm.
After four years of gradually building a home and routine together, Anne’s life in Paris has entered a new phase.
At the same time, she remains enthusiastic about acting work in Japan. Rather than allowing distance to close off professional possibilities, she travels when necessary while also protecting time for herself and her family—a lifestyle that has gradually become her own version of living between two worlds.
What We Can Learn From Anne Watanabe’s Beauty and Wellness Habits at 40
Anne Watanabe turned 40 in April 2026.
Looking back, she has described her twenties and thirties as periods when work, parenting, and whatever was immediately in front of her often received her full energy.
In an October 2026 conversation, she reflected on how moving to Paris gave her more time to make decisions for herself and to think more closely about the way she wanted to live.
After pushing forward through her twenties and thirties, one theme for her forties is learning to manage her own “on” and “off” modes.
Another idea she has emphasized for this stage of life is creating space.
Alongside time devoted to accomplishing something, she increasingly values moments when she can do nothing, think about nothing in particular, or simply leave time unfilled.
That philosophy is visible across the beauty and wellness habits she has developed over the years.
For skincare, it means toner after bathing, moisturizing the neck and décolletage, seasonal sun protection, and remembering hydration.
For movement, it has evolved from running and hiking in her twenties and strength training for acting roles to stretching, walking her dog, and occasionally jogging at 40.
For food, it means enjoying seasonal ingredients and cooking while keeping weekday meals simple and giving herself more time in the kitchen when her schedule allows.
For sleep and self-care, it means baths, stretching, stepping away from work in the evening, puzzles, good food, and other small things that help make everyday life enjoyable.
Even her daily dog walk reflects this approach. She may change the distance, add a little jogging, or switch the music she listens to, finding small ways to keep a familiar routine enjoyable.
In an October 2026 conversation, Anne also shared a phrase that captures something important about the way she makes decisions: rather than simply settling on something as “good,” she wants to feel, “Yes—this is the one.”
The idea is to make a choice she genuinely feels comfortable with at that particular moment. Even if circumstances later change, she can still recognize that it was the choice that felt right to her at the time. She has connected this way of thinking to major decisions in her life, including her move to Paris.
💡 Choosing What Feels Right for the Person She Is Now
One theme that runs through Anne’s life is making choices she can genuinely embrace in the moment. The same flexibility can be seen in the way her skincare, exercise, food, rest, and family routines have evolved as her circumstances have changed.
Living in Paris has also helped soften the sense that life has to follow one fixed version of how things “should” be. Instead, Anne increasingly chooses approaches that suit herself and her family at a particular stage of life.
That helps explain why exercise in her twenties can look different from exercise at 40, or why breakfast in Paris can look different from breakfast in Tokyo, while all of these habits still belong to the same evolving lifestyle.
From international modeling as a teenager to a long acting career, marriage, raising twins and a son, and living across Paris, Tokyo, and Finland, Anne has moved through many different stages of life.
What emerges from her beauty and wellness habits is a willingness to keep reshaping everyday routines into forms that feel comfortable and realistic for her current life.
Moisturize. Drink water. Use sun protection. Walk. Stretch. Enjoy seasonal food and cooking. Take a bath or sauna. Sleep. Make time for things you enjoy. Leave some room in the day.
At 40, beauty and wellness for Anne Watanabe appear closely woven into the ordinary rhythms of life itself: raising three children, traveling between Paris and Tokyo, working as an actress, and still making space for the small routines and pleasures that matter to her.
References
- Mainichi Kirei | Anne Watanabe on skincare, moisturizing, bathing and sleep
- HugMug | Anne Watanabe on moisturizing, décolletage care and skincare while parenting
- Nikkan Sports | Anne Watanabe on rest and making an effort not to overdo things
- MANTANWEB | Anne Watanabe’s strength training for an acting role
- THE FIRST TIMES | Anne Watanabe on hydration, sleep, wellness and small pleasures
- Fujinkoron.jp | Anne Watanabe on Paris life, cooking, breakfast and family meals
- Fujinkoron.jp | Anne Watanabe on her forties and changing perspectives in Paris
- ESSEonline | Anne Watanabe on her evening hour, puzzles, sleep and stretching
- Liniere.jp | Anne Watanabe on Finland, sauna and BLOOD & SWEAT
- Mainichi Kirei | Anne Watanabe’s morning dog walks and routine at 40
- Nikkan Sports | Anne Watanabe on four years in Paris, her children and European life
- Nikkan Sports | Anne Watanabe on life choices, Paris and entering her forties
