As one of television’s hottest vampires, one would think that actor Ian Somerhalder—who plays the blood-sucking Damon Salvatore in the series The Vampire Diaries—would be an “eternal youth” fan.

But really, he's the exact opposite.

At the press conference for Penshoppe, the local fashion brand he currently endorses, held on May 23 at the Peninsula Manila Hotel in Makati, Ian expressed his liking for true beauty and natural aging.

The topic came about when a reporter asked him to give his thoughts on the suggestion of international fashion title Vogue Magazine to put an age limit on fashion models.

Being a professional model himself—he began his modeling career at the age of 10 before progressing as a television actor later on in 1997 when he first appeared in an episode of the series The Big Easy—Ian agreed that, “There absolutely should be a way to limit how young these girls are.

“I remember when I was 15, 16 years old in the fashion business, these girls that were literally labeled [as] kind of supermodels they were like 14 years old!

“And it’s a very strange thing that you have a 14-year-old girl, maybe 5 feet 11 inches [tall] who looks like she’s 25, but selling clothes—high-end clothes—to adult women.

“[These are] women chasing this fountain of youth and beauty…and yet it’s from a 14-year-old!

“So how does a 45-year-old woman, who’s agonizing over getting older—and to begin with [she's] already beautiful and wonderful—agonizing over why she looks so old, compare to this model?

“Well, there’s one little thing she’s forgetting about and that is that model is a freshman in high school or an eighth grader or a sophomore in high school.

“So, it’s this, I totally disagree with how that works.

”But I think that that is part of the fashion industry, which has been going on for many years.

“So, maybe, we can be agents of change and sort of allow that to sort of organically segue into being a little more true to whatever brand you’re selling.”

Ian even further related the issue to the negative effects of “Photoshopped” images in ads and magazines on the human psyche.

“I tell you what, Photoshop is what destroys us,” he says.

“I mean, how do you compete with that little mouse?