Meet Sports Illustrated’s new 56-year-old swimsuit model

She’s the mom of reinvention.

Nearly three decades in the past, Kathy Jacobs was a wide-eyed Ford model who landed the protect of Woman’s Globe. Right after many years of modeling in New York, the married mom of one particular turned to a vocation in baking and making her personal natural beauty merchandise.

Now, at the age of 56, Jacobs is primed to pose once all over again. The 5-foot-three resident of Calabasas, California, is a first-time Sports activities Illustrated Swimsuit Concern model, featured in this year’s situation, out July 21. She experienced entered SI’s open-simply call contest Swim Lookup, and is one particular of six finalists between thousands of swimsuit hopefuls.

“I believe it is quite great that I get to occur back again to modeling all over again,” Jacobs, who recorded a teary video for Persons magazine soon after finding the simply call that she experienced landed a coveted spot in the bikini bible, tells The Write-up. Her takeaway? “Don’t ever give up on your self.”

Over decades of vocation highs and lows, she’s experienced to live by people phrases.

“I have reinvented myself so lots of instances,” Jacobs tells The Write-up. “I have been on the “Today” demonstrate and Rachael Ray baking and doing crafts.” Jacobs appeared in a 2017 episode of Steve Harvey’s “Funderdome” levels of competition for business people, hawking her handmade pores and skin treatment line Magnificence Batters. She has also taken humbling, bare minimum-wage positions, such as sweeping up hair at Drybar.

She not long ago experienced a wellness scare. 3 many years in the past, she was shocked to understand she was prediabetic. “The doctors stated to me, ‘This is peculiar mainly because you aren’t chubby.’ It was hereditary,” claims Jacobs, whose mom has large blood stress and has experienced numerous strokes, resulting in dementia. The news brought about her to completely rethink her diet plan: “I do not take in bread, pasta, white potatoes, rice or meat. I take in fish and do not have sugar.”

But her resolve has been rewarded — and then some. In February, she and the other 5 Swim Lookup finalists flew to Turks and Caicos for a shoot the place she modeled much more bikinis than she could rely and felt assured. “I believe I search superior in a bikini than a one particular-piece,” she claims.

When it comes to natural beauty, the Texas indigenous claims she only makes use of her personal pores and skin treatment merchandise, produced from collagen-pleasant components these kinds of as pumpkin enzyme, vitamin C and orchid flower stem cells. She works out 4 instances a 7 days, and stays out of the solar.

And Jacobs — who just sent her daughter off to professional medical university in New York — admits she’s experimented with some dermatological boosts, such as Botox in her brow and lip fillers.

“I did crack down and get that not long ago. I preferred to search the ideal I could. If 20-calendar year-olds are finding it, why is there a stigma for another person my age? I want to be transparent to people. I do not want to be like the women my age who say it is just their diet plan and drinking lots of h2o when it is apparent they have carried out a thing.”

Clearly, age isn’t holding Jacobs back again.

The silver-haired stunner has above 68,000 followers on Instagram, the place she enjoys paid out partnerships with physique-acutely aware brand names like Shefit sporting activities bras.

And this 7 days, 29 many years soon after her unique Woman’s Globe protect, she landed one more one particular, strutting her stuff in a tasteful teal two-piece. She — like modern SI versions Tyra Banking institutions, 46, and Christie Brinkley, sixty six — hopes to demonstrate other ageing beauties that they can carry out something.

Future, she’s arranging to choose on one more stigma in the fashion entire world: height. The pint-sizing pinup wants to crack down barriers for the vertically challenged women of the entire world: “There aren’t any petite women on the runway and the average height of a lady in the US is 5-foot-4. Shoppers still only want tall girls.”

Jacobs doesn’t see why. “I am not just indicating women above fifty five make a difference, but petite girls make a difference. It is massive that I bought this significantly currently being 56 and brief.”