Where is the line between self acceptance and wanting to look well
Or...to Botox or not to Botox
I’m at the age where it feels as if you have to be careful in what company you air your opinions about treatments that make a person look younger, because it’s quite possible someone in the group is getting something done and you risk offending them.
Last year I interviewed two women I really admire, both of whom regularly speak about the treatments they get to their faces. At one point we were sitting in a hotel room as they were made up by various hair and make-up artists. The conversation turned to tweakments, and I was asked if I was getting anything done. I wasn’t, I replied, and I think my age came up. I am 100% sure neither woman has any memory of this but I felt awkward at the time, and rude ever since. As if my answer, unexplained, hung in the air like a judgment.
I’m not, because I can’t afford to, was the honest answer, otherwise, I’m not 100% sure what Profhilo is but from what friends have said I feel sure I’d be up for some. But, in the midst of a personal financial crisis at the time which I didn’t want to get into (I later wrote a cover feature for Life magazine on the matter – there’s another piece in why it's easier to write something you won’t see thousands of people read than to announce it to a room of 8 people), I said nothing.
My blank no felt like an implied criticism, given they regularly talk about these things (it is also absolutely true to say I’m overthinking this exchange, I’m sure neither woman gave it any further thought).
I’m writing this because a few weeks ago, I was commissioned to write a piece about a trend called two-faced, where women are getting Botox in the top half of their face, but not the bottom. It means that one half, the upper, can look age wise 20-30s, the bottom can be in the 40-50s. It involved speaking to various people in that world, and afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about it all.
For the first time in my life I felt really sad about the signs of ageing and genuinely tempted to do something to conceal its evidence on my face. One of the people I spoke to mentioned how at the age of 44, a woman’s face ages dramatically. Things drop. I’m 45, and I know exactly what she is talking about. I sometimes look up from reading or working in bed, and catch sight of my face in the mirror opposite and for a second think Jesus who is that? I’m now at that age.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about Jennifer Aniston being celebrated for looking fabulous at fifty, making the point that this wasn’t especially pro ageing, as Jennifer Aniston looks nothing like a typical fifty-year-old, so it wasn’t the win for pro-age celebration the magazines thought it was.
The woman is basically bringing the dedication of a professional athlete and the budget of a millionaire to self-preservation, because her job requires it. Kate Winslet was quoted recently in an interview in Time magazine saying she finds it annoying when female actresses are called brave for not wearing make-up or being comfortable in their bodies, pointing out that there is work that is actually brave, like those who pursued the Post Office scandal or people in Ukraine. And I love how she speaks about these things, and I also hate when we tell women they’re brave for simply showing the world who they are, but maybe it is also brave if the world is going to relentlessly judge you and comment endlessly over it if you show evidence of age?
But also, Jennifer Aniston being told she looks wonderful at fifty (unspoken subtext, FOR fifty) is not reflective of a world becoming kinder to older women, if anything it’s the opposite. Sure we’ll tell you you look great at fifty, only if you spend huge amounts of time and money trying to look anything but fifty. I made the same point years ago in a piece about Joan Collins and a friend of my mother’s started an argument with her over it, taking umbrage that I was being anti-ageist, because she felt I was saying a woman cannot look good in her seventies. When actually I was saying that opposite. That a woman can look great in her seventies, but Joan Collins isn’t that poster girl. Nothing against Joan Crawford, but she’s not a celebration of ageing that does the rest of us any favours.
There’s another example of this more recently in Demi Moore’s new film The Substance. Granted, we’re dealing with Hollywood’s take on ageing here, so the baseline attitude is, set your face to horrified and/or in awe of her bravery, that woman is slightly wrinkled. But as Emily Gould wrote brilliantly in a piece for The Cut, Demi Moore is one of the world’s most beautiful 62 year olds. The film’s basic premise, that she would willingly risk her life to look younger, feels flawed. Personally, I’d take looking like Moore at any age she has so far been (ditto for Meryl and Goldie in Death Becomes Her, another Hollywood offering with the message women looking old is horrifying and they should do anything to conceal it. Meryl was 43 at the time of filming that movie, Goldie Hawn 46, both playing a woman in her fifties). Again, I know it’s Hollywood, so why expect anything? But honestly it’s tiring to see these women trotted out in the name of being told getting old is a scary thing.
When I wrote the Jennifer Aniston piece, I was very early forties and I think I talked in it about not getting anything done. Older now I think idiot, you had no idea what you were talking about. I had no skin in the game, so to speak.
I was cautious about writing about this, I would like to point out before I go any further that my overriding, most important thought and feeling on all of this, is that no woman should be judged for doing whatever she wants to do to her body and face. We’re all existing in a world that is anti women ageing, where pretty privilege is a thing, where how we look is a key part of how women are valued. We’re all just doing our best to get by in that world.
Interviewing a woman recently we talked about why women are called brave for writing honestly about their lives, and I mentioned this piece and asked her what she thought. Everybody has a right to do what they want to do with their body, while investigating well why do they want to do that in the first place, and why they associate that with beauty, was her excellent answer.
I put it to a friend who is the same age and also has a daughter. I’m not sure exactly what my point or angle is. Just that I can’t stop thinking around it. Where is the line between self acceptance and wanting to look well, she replied, as we discussed the difference between your daughter asking why you shave your legs, and not wanting to get tweakments because how do you explain that one to her?
Shaving, waxing, bleaching, highlights, non-invasive, invasive, lifting, stretching. Where is the line?
Last winter, watching Dancing With The Stars, I told my daughter a woman’s hair was not all her own, she was wearing added in pieces. The look of surprise then bafflement on her face. But you need to start prepping them, showing them what is real and what is not, as they start to formulate standards against which to judge themselves.
I tell myself the lower the bar I set, the better for my daughter. I was six months into maternity leave before I found the small bit of time and space to put on any make up, she screamed and burst out crying. I think I looked like Marge (Simpson) and the make-up gun to her.
I like to see setting the bar low as doing my daughter a favour. If she grows up around a person who considers shaved legs and roots that aren’t too dark to be doing well, she gets to go easier on herself.
I want to not care that much about how I look. I don’t want to give that much of a shit.
It feels a little bit like the clothes you don’t want to let go of because you tell yourself if you lose a few pounds you will fit into them again, but if you are really honest, getting back to that size of yourself would, if it was even possible, involve such stringency and self-denial that it would not be remotely worth it in the first place. Dolly Alderton said something in an interview years ago to the Irish Times (I can’t find the piece to credit the journalist) that has lived in my mind since. That when a woman starts dieting, and gets the reaction of the weight loss from those around here, in a way she enters a gilded prison in her mind, that it is extremely hard to ever leave.
It's not that I don't care how I look, am entirely without vanity. I'm not sure that's possible. And it’s also not that I don’t think there can be celebratory aspects of this kind of thing.
A new outfit/hairstyle/nails. I want to look after myself, and use nice creams and have nice hair and wear nice clothes. But I want to look like myself, as I am now, to lean into that rather than constantly striving for a former version, that lives inside my mind like Alderton’s gilded cage idea. I’d like to be happy to be a good enough, rather than a constant harking back. Self-acceptance is the goal because it’s so much more comfortable a place to be than constant striving. But also each to their own because we’re all surely just doing our best with this stuff? So if you want to or do get the stuff done, that’s grand too.
In the end, it’s the gender aspect that really bothers me (and maybe people who pretend they haven’t had anything done, that feels extremely ungenerous to other women. See Marian Keyes’ approach to this - like everything she does, the height of generosity to other women - she speaks openly on her Instagram about all whatever work she has had). It’s not what individual women do, but that we’re expected to do so much more than men. Are men, I wonder, making films about how awful it is to see signs of age their face? I don’t think so.
This picture sums it up.
There is two years between these two people. TWO. She’s 54, he’s 56. Everything about him is, to me, more comfortable, from the flat shoes, to the comfortable (still extremely stylish) clothes, to the lines on his face that mean he looks his age. Watch a video of this scene and she’s awkwardly tottering in high heels and a very tight dress with an annoying flap of fabric blowing from it that she’s forced to keep dealing with. He’s delighted with himself, at ease, and in flat shoes. I’m not for one minute blaming Rachel Weisz for this. She lives within the system. As do we all.
I’m reading Things I Don’t Want to Know at the moment, the first of Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography trilogy (part two, The Cost of Living, is one of my favourite books of all time and one of the best books a woman rebuilding her life and creating a new home after a big relationship ends can read).
She's talking about mothers judging each other, in the park and at the school gates, when her kids are young, and she quotes Adrienne Rich. ‘No Woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.’
Motherhood, Levy writes, was an institution fathered by masculine consciousness. So is women ageing. That is what we need to push back on I think.
PS Brad Pitt recently had a facelift.
I recently went for a consultation for laser resurfacing and the surgeon began the chat by talking about how a facelift would benefit me. I was totally taken aback but afterwards I began to think about it and decided that yes, if I could afford it, I would absolutely like a facelift. I don’t really want to look younger, I think that’s very difficult to achieve, but I resent looking in the mirror and not seeing me anymore. Part of that is the result of a premature menopause and not having skin-plumping oestrogen for 15 years now, when, in normal circumstances, the menopause would just be beginning. I feel cheated out of a decade’s benefits of hormones. I first got tweakments when I was in the thick of horrible menopause symptoms, I was helping to care for my dad who had dementia and cancer, and I was having health issues. Those tweakments gave me such a lift in the midst of what was a very dark time and it honestly came down to seeing myself in the mirror again rather than a cross-looking, haggard stranger. So if I win the Lotto, a facelift it is!