Cameron Diaz Says Calling Someone Pretty is a Bad Compliment

Hollywood icon Cameron Diaz has said that complimenting a woman on her looks is a bad thing.

Such compliments put women under too much pressure to look their best, she said.

"On the set of Annie, we have all these little super-sweet girls who are extras and they come up to me and say: 'Oh Cammie, you are so pretty, your hair is so pretty, your clothes are so pretty.' And that's sweet, but it worries me that girls are conditioned to value themselves and judge each other by the way they look. I try to let them know that being 'pretty' will not sustain them," the 41-year-old Diaz stated.

The stunner also revealed that she thinks twice before telling them how sweet they look and instead asks them how school is going.

"I resist that instinctive urge to say: 'Oh, you are so cute!' and instead ask: 'What grade are you in at school?' or: 'What is your favourite subject? Because every time we address our daughters or our nieces by saying: 'You look lovely today,' we are reinforcing the idea that the most important thing for a woman is to look good," she added.

Diaz admitted that she was not always confident about her looks.

"I used to have horrible acne, deep, boiling pimples," she said.

She also recently admitted that she did not like using Botox because it made her face look weird.

"There's no such thing as anti-aging. There's no such thing as turning back the hands of time, and it makes me crazy that we live in a society where that's sold to women - that we're supposed to believe that if we're getting older, we've failed somehow, that we have failed by not staying young," said Diaz, who was recently promoting her book, The Body Book.

"I don't want to look like I did when I was 25. I like the way that I look now better than when I was 25. I can't help that other people may be uncomfortable with that, but that's not my responsibility to make them feel OK with the fact that I'm getting older. I'm OK with it. I like it," she added to the People magazine.

On the professional front, she will be seen in three films this year. The first of which is a comedy called The Other Woman, which also stars Leslie Mann and Kate Upton, and is slated for an April release.