Celebrity Naturist of the Year 2007: Eva Mendes

Eva Mendes is our first-ever Celebrity Naturist of the Year because of her statements this year that she often liked to be gardening in the nude, while also offering to pose naked for an anti-fur campaign by the action group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

2007 was a great year for celebrities and non-sexual nudity. Dame Helen Mirren was also a strong contender for this award, since she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and is known to be a real naturist. In 2004, she won the British Naturist of the Year Award.

It is not always easy to know whether stars only enjoy being naked in their swimming pool, their garden, their home when they're alone, or whether they would also enjoy social nudity at resorts and beaches.

While Eva Mendes might not recognize herself as a true naturist, Asianaturist thinks she qualifies for its Celebrity Naturist of the Year Award because she obviously feels comfortable being naked in a daily setting, outside fashion photo's and movie sets.

Naked gardening as a separate activity has also taken a strong leap forward over the past few years with garden owners holding open-garden days for naturist visitors.

Asianaturist believes that the statements and actions from Eva Mendes will help to promote naturism - non-sexual, social nudity - as a healthy lifestyle among the public in general, her fans, women, and Hispanic Americans.

The 28-year-old Cuban-American actress starred in 'Training Day' and 'Out of Time' with Denzel Washington, 'Once Upon a Time in Mexico' with Antonio Banderas and Johnny Depp, 'Stuck On You' with Matt Damon, 'Bad Boys 2' and 'Hitch' with Will Smith, 'Ghost Rider' with Nicolas Cage, and more recently in 'We Own The Night' with Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix.

You can read more about Eva Mendes at her official web site, www.evamendes.com. For more information about her campaign for PETA, visit www.furisdead.com/feat_eva_mendes.asp.

Real Naturists of the Year 2007: Mark and Samantha Taylor

I've always loved stories of personal change. Stories where the main character reaches middle age and decides to throw his or her 9-to-5 job overboard and starts a completely new life, often in a completely different place.

That's more or less what Mark and Samantha Taylor did, though they didn't wait until middle age. A couple from Great Britain, he a chef, she an investment banker, they decided to leave their familiar environment and move to a small island off the west coast of Greece to set up a naturist resort.

The Vassaliki Naturist Club (http://www.vasnat.com/) on the island of Kefalonia opened only last May, so 2007 was the first year of operations for the resort. According to its newsletter, the place did a good business, attracting even visitors from the Far East last August.

The 'Naturist Info' section on the club's web site also includes an interesting story about how Mark gradually introduced Samantha to naturism, in a way that could be a model of how a naturist can make a 'textile' spouse familiar with the clothes-free lifestyle.

For daring to live their dreams, and leaving a career and family behind to strike out for naturism in a way that many others would like to do but only dream about, the Asianaturist blog has chosen Mark and Samantha Taylor of the Vassaliki Naturist Club in Kefalonia, Greece, as its first-ever Real Naturists of the Year.

A short version of their story can also be found at http://ukirelandtravel.suite101.com/article.cfm/greeces_new_naturist_resort

Within the next few days, I also hope to be announcing the choice for Celebrity Naturist of the Year.

Merry Christmas 2007

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2008 to all naturists everywhere around the world.

The luckiest ones of course must be in the Southern Hemisphere, where Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina and Chile must have the perfect weather for naturism. European naturists will probably be heading for the Canary Islands, the part of Spain off the west coast of Africa.

I just spent a couple of days in hot and humid Singapore, where I took the picture in the lobby of the venerable Raffles Hotel. It was more than 27 degrees outside, unfortunately both the Singapore government and the frequent and very heavy rain storms over those few days prevent you from having any naturist holiday there.

Remember, within the next few days I will also be announcing whom I will give my Naturist of the Year Awards for 2007 to. First I will announce the Real Naturist(s) of the Year - someone who worked on spreading naturism either by activism or by opening a resort and choosing naturism as a lifestyle - and at least one day later I will follow up with the Celebrity Naturist of the Year - an already famous person who has been in the news for naturist-friendly ideas as well.

Enjoy the holidays and come back soon.

Naturist of the Year : The Categories

I've been wondering: to give my Naturist of the Year Award more exposure, wouldn't it be better if I actually introduced different categories, as they do with other awards?

First of all, there could be an award for what I would like to call the 'real' naturists: the people who live and breathe naturism day in day out, the activists, the organization women and men, the resort owners, the bloggers. In other words, the kind of people I mentioned in the contenders' list in my previous posting.

A second category, which would help me in publicize my action, would be an award for a 'celebrity' naturist of the year. There of course, things could get tricky, because you don't really know which celebrities are real naturists and which ones just enjoy hanging around naked at home.

The most famous naturist celebrity and the most successful over the past year must be Britain's Dame Helen Mirren, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in 'The Queen.' We know she's a real naturist because she said so. With other stars, it's more difficult. Newcomer Hayden Panettiere of the popular U.S. series 'Heroes' apparently likes to hang out naked at the pool with her friends, Alicia Silverstone and Eva Mendes are often naked at home and have appeared naked in ads for good causes. The question is whether they have to go to naturist resorts and beaches to be real naturists. Celebrities might not want to be naked in public places - even naturist ones - because they fear they will be harassed by paparazzi or by autograph hunters.

In any event, I now plan to announce my choice for Naturist of the Year on or around Christmas, and wage a small-scale promotion campaign of my own to support it. So if you want news about my plans, please keep coming back to this blog and also read previous postings about my Naturist of the Year campaign.

Naturist of the Year: The Contenders

Remember my posting with the suggestion to issue a Naturist of the Year Award just like the Nobel Prizes, Academy, Emmy and Grammy Awards?
No, I didn't forget about the idea, but I took some time off and looked around for worthy recipients. I will still keep the winner(s) a secret until the end of this month. Not that he or she or they will miss much, since I'm not awarding any money and I don't have any piece of art ready either - unless you count an old T-shirt from the International Naturist Federation.
What I would like to do this time is to suggest a couple of contenders for such a Naturist of the Year Award. The first thing that caught my attention though, is that most of the contenders are not individuals, but teams. Teams sometimes as small as a husband and wife, or sometimes as large as a business or an organization.
The first team likely to be a strong contender for Naturist of the Year, is the group of people in California running the Clothes Free International web site. The group also runs a weekly television show about naturist issues. Yes, they do it naked, but not to titillate people, as some nude TV stations in Canada and Russia do, but to talk with naturists about naturist events. The web site also includes a busy forum. My first contender for Naturist of the Year is Corky Stanton's team at the 14,000-member strong http://www.clothesfree.com/.
The second team consists of just two people, Thomas Gee and Alexandra Agudelo. They also run a popular web site, Nudist Day or http://www.nudistday.com/, which regularly features news from the naturist world with an emphasis on Latin America, Spain and Portugal. The web site also has a Spanish-language version, useful in promoting naturism in the Spanish-speaking part of the world. Wish I could have something like that in Chinese and other Asian languages.
The third team would be Tom and Mary Clare Mulhall of Palm Springs in California. The couple runs a naturist resort in the sunny desert town, but also provides news and opinion about naturist issues on its blog, http://terracottainn.blogspot.com/.
Last but not least in this posting, I will mention the worldwide team of the International Naturist Federation. From a small office in the Belgian town of Antwerp, and under the current leadership of a German chairman, the organization comprises of naturist organizations worldwide, from the traditional heartland of Germany, France and the Netherlands, to other parts of the world such as Brazil, South Africa and New Zealand. Countries where naturism is banned, sometimes have an INF correspondent functioning as contact person. As mentioned before in this blog, the INF also publishes a practical guidebook to naturist resorts.
I know, there are many other naturist organizations and even individual militants worldwide who work for naturism day in day out, but today's list is not meant to be exhaustive.
The winners of my first Naturist of the Year Award will not necessarily be chosen from this list, but these are some of the most likely and strongest contenders. Come back to this blog to read the name of the winner(s) before the end of December 2007!

The Next Bible

The next Bible of Naturism is coming. The publishers of the annual International Naturist Federation World Handbook, Germany's Warlick Publishing House, have announced they are preparing for the issue of the 2008 guide.

The book will officially go on sale at a travel fair in the central Dutch city of Utrecht in January 2008, that's next month.

I'll write more about the book on this blog as soon as I get more information, but it's certain to be another handy reference guide to naturist resort, holiday centers, hotels and beaches all over the world, from Argentina to Sweden to South Africa.

In the meantime here's that picture again with the covers of previous editions, and in my next post I'll be telling you more about my Naturist of the Year project.