Eczema snuck up on Tori Spelling as an adult. With her first flare, “I just remember feeling like something was on my arms…and I was itching and itching until eventually, it started appearing,” she tells SELF in an interview for her new Free to Be Me campaign with Arcutis, the makers of a topical therapy for inflammatory skin conditions called Zoryve, which Spelling now uses. Once her eczema became visible in the form of dry, scaly patches, it was all she could see—and all she feared others could see too. The year was 2006, and she was in the midst of filming her TV show So NoTORIous. “It became so painful and got so severe that we had to alter my wardrobe and shut down production for a day,” she says.
Though the Beverly Hills, 90210 alum says she was “on top of the world” career-wise at the time, she was also “suffering through so much behind the scenes,” she says, namely the stress of her first divorce (from actor Charlie Shanian), which she now suspects brought her eczema to the surface. Though stress itself doesn’t cause eczema—genetic factors are thought to play a role, and Spelling would come to learn it runs in her family—emotional turmoil can act as a trigger. It’s no wonder, she says, that her eczema “came back full charge” in the wake of her second divorce, in 2024, from actor Dean McDermott.
As she stepped into being a single mom of five kids while working full-time and managing the fallout of the divorce, her symptoms began to take a physical and mental toll. “The more I would itch, the worse it would get and the more it seemed to spread,” she says. She was carving out scars, she adds, by scratching so intensely. This time, even the steroid creams and over-the-counter salves she’d once relied on didn’t seem to cut it—which is what led her back to her dermatologist and to finding a more helpful solution in Zoryve. Now, looking back, Spelling bemoans the embarrassment that kept her from speaking out sooner and wants to do her part to normalize the effects of eczema and dismantle the stigma.
“I’m a hand talker, so people naturally look at my hands and arms when I’m speaking,” Spelling says, “and whenever I had a flare-up, I would always feel like, Oh gosh, do they see all these spots on my hands? It would take over my brain in the midst of a conversation.” What hit Spelling even harder over the years was watching her daughter Stella, 17, face the same stigma tied to her own eczema, which started when she was a baby. “Other kids at school would say, really loudly, ‘What’s wrong with her arms?’” Spelling recounts. At the same time, Stella also got bullied for her seborrheic dermatitis, a different inflammatory skin condition that cropped up on her scalp and created visible patches of flaky skin. It all crushed Spelling: “No matter what you go through personally, you always want to find ways to shelter your kids from embarrassment,” she says.
For a while, Stella’s experience pushed Spelling to stay quiet. As did the misconceptions she would sometimes hear from others when it came to eczema. “People really don’t understand it. They’re like, ‘Isn’t it just dry skin?’” she says. It felt like a burden to repeatedly explain that, no, it’s actually a skin condition. Plus, keeping this one thing to herself gave her a sense of control. “Before now, I was just like, ‘Everyone knows everything else about my life. If I can hide this one thing, then I’m personally winning,’” Spelling says.
But her mindset started to shift as she watched Stella, who’s also now on Zoryve, find relief from the worst of her flare-ups and also connect with other teens on social media who share openly about their experiences with eczema. “She’s the one who inspired me to talk about it now,” says Spelling of Stella, who’s also part of the Zoryve campaign. “I always say to her, ‘I wish I had half the confidence you have at age 17.’ She made me realize that I should share this with people because my journey might help others.”
It’s not the first time Spelling has been candid about her health in recent years. In 2023, she posted on Instagram about the “extreme mold” in the home she was renting with her children and the “spiral of sickness” that plagued them as a result, including respiratory infections and allergy-like symptoms. (They’ve all been feeling better, she reports, since moving.)
Around that same time, Spelling shared on her podcast misSPELLING that she’d experienced a few fainting spells that landed her in the hospital, attributing them to the effects of being “completely dehydrated” because she “hates water.”
In our chat, Spelling points out that stress and lack of self care was probably contributing to these fainting incidents too. “I’ve always been much better at taking care of my kids than I am at taking care of myself,” she says. Her youngest is eight years old, so she notes it’s still challenging for her to find me-time. “But I have gotten to the point in the last couple of years, with everything we’ve been through, of realizing that if I’m not solid, then there’s no one there for them. I’ve had to begrudgingly force myself to hydrate and check in with my body,” she says. To get past her water aversion? She puts lemons in it, opts for sparkling over still, and buys the waters in “pretty bottles”—anything to bring a bit more joy, she says.
Now on a healthier trajectory, Spelling has been keeping up with recording episodes of her two podcasts (90210MG and misSPELLING) and putting in work on a still-under-wraps upcoming project that she teases “might be a fun reboot.”
