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 (roflumilast), 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.
