Woman shows signs of ageing shocker
Newsflash: I don’t love it
I turn 54 at the weekend. Depending where you are on the age spectrum, you will either think: “How ancient!”, “So spring chickenish!”, or “And?” For me, it’s feeling like one of those weird ages to which an illogical psychological weight attaches. (Boasting a CSE in maths probably doesn’t help.) Where 53 sounded young in a “just turned 50” sort of fashion, so 54 sounds a lot like 55, which I’m basically taking to mean 60.
Being an individual of the female persuasion, inevitably there’s an element of facial awareness involved in this. I say “awareness” because my situation isn’t too much more angsty that this. I may boast a side-hustle writing about what used to be termed “anti-ageing” before some of us pointed out that ageing is better than the alternative, and rather interesting to boot. However, my beauty column is called “Better Not Younger,” and I mean it. I have no desire to be part of the groupthink that sees age as foxily distinguished in chaps, but the absolute fucking end in women.
And, yet, this is how our culture regards it, however much many of us strive for it to be otherwise. A case in point: last week, US astronauts Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore returned to earth after an 8-day jaunt turned into a nine-month endurance test. I was immediately asked to write about 59-year-old Williams’s aged appearance, specifically how it epitomised “every woman’s worst nightmare”. For Williams had gone grey, appeared gaunt, tired.
She looked pretty damn good to me: one of the world’s most experienced spacewalkers, a returning heroine, happy to be alive. Space ages everybody for well-documented biological reasons. Wilmore is older at 62, and looked similarly knackered. However, in the global coverage decrepitude was the cross that Williams had to bear. And the world and his wife agreed with my (extremely canny) editor.
In the main, I’ve not been too bothered by my own ageing. Yes, I am scrupulous about sun-protection. True, I have a little light Botox every now and then. And, admitted - despite only boasting a miniscule amount of grey – I’m having the odd gloss applied until I go all out silver. Still, I’m pretty low-maintenance, not least for someone who could try every new gimmick gratis. I have state-of-the-art lasers lurkening unopened. I don’t even use vitamin C or retinol – the basic b*tch skincare duo that indicates a midlifer is “trying”.
I genuinely prefer my face now: at 20, it looked featureless, an amorphous cloud. From my late 30s onwards - when we are told shit is fan-hitting - I began acquiring bone structure. And I liked it. If this was the face I deserved, then, broadly speaking, I was okay with it. I adore the self-fashioning element of cosmetics, as I do with clothes. And I’m obsessed by the aesthetics of self-presentation; the theatre, psychology and anthropology behind lipstick, powder and paint. However, I’ve never felt looks were my strong suit, meaning age is not any great loss. Besides, it’s kind of fascinating.
And, yet – for here we have the “and, yet” - to be absolutely honest, it’s also because I hadn’t aged that much. By which I mean not suddenly, or in too seismic a way. Brace yourself for intolerable smugness, but people have generally assumed I’m a good ten, sometimes even twenty years younger; including medics, including skin experts. This could be my immaturity, the way I dress, or how I hold myself. But, it was also because my complexion hadn’t been that slumped or wrinkled.
Only, now, in the last couple of months, I’ve been beginning to see alteration take hold. No less an authority than George Clooney once observed that the way ageing works isn’t gradual. Instead, every ten years, you age ten years - pretty much overnight. For me, this is now. Visually something has happened, possibly because of that other great feminised fetish, weight loss, plus doubtless some hormonal shunt.
The incredulity when I refer to my years has gone missing in action. When I call myself an “old woman,” no one objects. I know there’s rather a lot going on in the world, am aware that my solipsism is staggering. But, over in Bettsville, dilapidation is where it’s at. Something is shifting, and - frankly - it’s an arse.
It started with noticing my throat in photographs: the vertical strip in the centre looked….what? Not lined so much as vulnerable, less firm, its texture fragile, puckered like caught material. It conjured that “ancient” female judge character in Nineties anti-feminist fuck-fest Ally McBeal, Jennifer “Whipper” Cone (almost “crone”!), portrayed by Dyan Cannon, beloved of McBeal boss Richard Fish. Whipper had a wattle, a turkey neck that her suitor perversely fetishised; because there can be no greater perversion than finding an older bird hot. Maybe I’ll never reach full wattle. But, laxity? Laxity I have increasingly got covered.
Next in the ch-ch-ch changes arena, I have acquired marionette lines, not the charming smile lines of a life well-grinned at, but sad, defeated, etchings-cum-protrusions under the corner of each lip. At their summit, they are indents. Lower down, they look puffier, curiously pouch-like. I’ve decided it’s a punishment for pouting in my twenties, which I would do when self-conscious, which was pretty much always; my sisters billing it my “restaurant-ordering face”. A boyfriend once insisted I was unlined in my capacity as an emotionless bitch, but that the little emotion I did possess was expressed via my mouth. Clearly, it’s payback time.
Most pathetic in the line-up: I have an age spot. I know, I know: just the one? A solitary freckle, hardly DEFCON 1. But, because it’s just the one, it stands out like a Belisha beacon, its message: “Time’s winged chariot? It’s coming for you, sister.” Meanwhile, my eyebrows and lashes have been dropping out, which everyone tells me is a sign of stress. But, when is one not stressed? Surely, it’s simply senescent balding? As for the rest of my hair, I have taken to sporting that universal sign of midlife defeat: the slicked-back bun. In some women, this renders them a paragon of lustrous-locked elegance. In me, it’s a scrawny geriatric pigtail.
I had to have a makeover the other day with an artist who’d never done my face before. This meant she didn’t play matters maquillage the way I play them: the calculated trompe de’l'oeil, enlarging my pisshole-in-the-snow eyes, concealing the shadows under them, contriving a pair of cheekbones. Instead, she gave me one of those general polishes that I associate with either very young or senior-citizen slap: a gentle, all-over zhush. As I said in the subsequent copy, everyone else hugely preferred it. However, it left me feeling a bit bland, featureless, exposed. My under-eyes, in particular, looked – and here’s that word again – vulnerable, suspiciously soft.
Traditionally, at this point in articles written by females of a certain age, I should reveal the radical solution I have chosen to address all of the above. However, my inclination is toward the truly radical “nothing” (or the same sort of “not much” I have hitherto engaged in).