Facing reality
Women may just have to accept growing older gracefully, says Susan Boyd Isuppose there is a time in your life when you long to appear older perhaps when you are 15. You pile on the make-up, you dress ‘up’, you start lying about your age. This is a short-lived period apart from the lying bit.
But in the grown-up world, who doesn’t hate the thought, far less the reality, of ageing? And who doesn’t hate it more than a woman? Especially a woman who reads the kind of magazines that worship the best cosmetic surgeons in town. It is hard to resist their siren call not to mention seeing your own progressively slacker image in the mirror each morning. Every TV makeover show and every newly minted celebrity makes you feel you should be ‘doing something’ to defy the ageing process.
The sculptor Antony Gormley perhaps didn’t realise the potency of his words — ‘we all live on the other side of our appearances. Our faces belong more to others than they do to ourselves’ — to today’s generation of middle-aged women. The ‘others’ in their lives are women of a similar age who now boast crease-free brows, plumped-up cheeks and wide-eyed stares. The women who don’t want you to ‘give in’ and let the world know that age happens.
These ‘others’ will come up with a host of reasons why it is crazy not to take advantage of everything cosmetic that is available today. After all, you don’t let all your teeth fall out and your hair turn grey. So why not sign up for Restylane injections and then the first nip-and-tuck?
And if you ever have been sucked into watching reality TV, then you will no doubt have felt uncomfortable at the sight of ‘celebrities’ like Jan Leeming, Carole Malone and Rula Lenska. One usually sees these people carefully made up and well lit — not exposed to the harsh jungle sun or the shadowless world of the Big Brother stu dio. In these environments the woman post-45 does not fare well. Not only is she in the constant company of smooth-limbed girls half her age, but she also has to suffer the further indignity of being more critically mauled for her looks than her balding, fat, male fellow inmates are.
What’s a girl to do? Those of us who genuinely don’t want to go under the knife or inject fillers into our faces must develop a thicker, albeit more wrinkly, skin. We must start a backlash — after all, most men don’t like the pinned-back look and are not fooled into believing that the woman standing at the bar is really 20 years younger than her birth certificate. In fact, I have a theory that plastic surgery can make you look older. I recently went to New York and saw a friend I hadn’t seen for about four years, when she was 31. In the intervening years she has started ‘age prevention’ proce dures. Now at the age of 35 her face is a total mask — not a sign of a passing moment. I’m sure she hoped that I thought she looked only 29. I didn’t. She looked like a woman of 50 who had had some serious work done. This theory needs to be more widely disseminated.
But in the current climate it becomes ever harder to remain resolute and stick to the philosophy that ageing gracefully is what counts. A story from a friend in LA still haunts me. She gave her mother a 70th birthday party and invited all her Hollywood stretched and sculpted friends. She also flew in Jenny, one of her mother’s childhood pals, as a surprise. Jenny was 70. Jenny looked 70. She was introduced as ‘my mother’s old schoolfriend’ — never was an introduction so redundant.
So how long can the resolute anti-cosmetic-surgery woman hold out? What if she accepts that soon she will be the ‘Jenny’ at every gathering? She knows that ‘some work on your face’ has become a modern-day rite of passage, with actresses as young as Scarlett Johansson saying, ‘I definitely believe in plastic surgery. I don’t want to be an old hag. There’s no fun in that.’ However, if letting nature take its course is a plan, then women need strategies. We should keep buying ‘hope’ in a jar, stay out of the sun and do what we did at 15 — lie: add years instead of instinctively subtracting. Those ‘doesn’t she look good for her age’ compliments will soon be on everyone’s lips.
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