It’s high time for somebody to stand up and crown Oprah the official celebrity face of bathing. The multi-billionaire has cemented her status many times over the years, referring to her daily soaks in the tub as both a hobby and her preferred form of artistic expression. Perhaps you’ve even seen the ubiquitous shot of O reclining in a mountain of fluffy bubbles, looking knowingly at the camera, a flute of champagne in hand. That smile can easily be attributed to the one thing Oprah knows about bathing that the average person just does not: It’s all about the tub.
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For an interview in Vogue’s September 2017 issue, Winfrey invited writer Jonathan Van Meter into her home for the second time since he’d profiled the star at her home in Telluride in 1998, where he recalled seeing a tub that was “molded and shaped to [her] body.” “I still have a nice bathtub,” she told Van Meter, nearly 10 years later. “I major in bathtubs. I spend my time looking for the best possible bathtub a woman can buy.” Her longtime partner Stedman, she said, hadn’t even been in the current one.
Oprah's bathtub obsession, she explained to Van Meter, “came from the fact that I was raised with my father in, like, an 1,100-square-foot house where we all shared the same tub… I vowed if I ever got my own place, I was going to get myself a good tub!” She said that’s also why she had 11 dogs at one point — her father wouldn’t let the dog she brought back from Milwaukee as a “despondent teenager hiding a pregnancy,” and she vowed “If . . . IIIIIIII. . . evvvvvvvver git some money, I’m gonna have as many dogs as I want. That’s how I’ve overcompensated: with dogs and tubs.”
You can never have too many puppies or luxe bathtubs in this life, as long as you have the space for them — and, on her 56-acre California estate, Oprah definitely does.
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