In the vast and gray sahara of middle age, why is it that women aren’t allowed to get wrinkly and grow old gracefully? Aging, a once inevitable part of the human process, is insidiously being stopped in its tracks, a disease that requires immediate cosmeceutical attention.
“Your back hurts more,” said Woody Allen. “You get more indigestion. Your eyesight isn’t good, you need a hearing aid. It’s bad business getting older; I would advise you not to do it if you can avoid it.” Okay. So, it’s not much fun.
When we spout tropes like “old men look distinctive” and “old women are sad, shriveled old prunes who look like battered bags,” we become part of a conspiracy of tyranny that distorts reality, and makes women willing slaves and victims of their own insecurities.
We look at images of attractive women—rising stars, fading meteorites—and want to look like them. We can’t. These are airbrushed images that create an ideal of beauty impossible to attain without clever digital manipulation.
Next time you want to torture yourself with these shiny pictures, have Vogue in one hand and the National Enquirer in the other. In the unforgiving glare of sunlight, without industrial amounts of makeup and a fresh injection of fillers, heck, do they really look like that, you might well ask.
There is nothing sisterly about women of a certain age wittering on to each other about their beauty routines. We lie. Women will always sit in judgment of other women. What?! Just soap and water? Eight hours of sleep? Sex? Bucketloads of Evian? Hell’s bells: what hypocrites we have become, making sport for each other.
So we look surreptitiously at friends’ wind-lashed faces for tell-tale scars behind the ears, eyebrows that don’t move; stare at bee-stung lips, ping-pong cheeks, the pair of hard globes bursting out of push-up bras.
Crumpled bed
In a narcissistic age, when we expose more than we conceal, we judge others by their appearance. We silently tut-tut in condemnation when we see someone looking like a crumpled bed, slightly worse for wear.
Thanks to accessible pornography, the unreasonable expectations of men, the relentless image bombardment of bootylicious babes by media, and the unbearable weight of peer pressure, exhibitions of acres of flesh and aspirations of beauty have become constants of our modern lives.
Old women who want to look young, who are they fooling? When even famously gorgeous Norris Church bemoans: “If I walk by a mirror, it’s just too dispiriting.” Mrs. Norman Mailer, 62, admits she slathers full makeup on even when alone.
Beauty is a very big business—$200 billion on anti-aging treatments alone—because we want to be lied to. The sunlit uplands of our younger days, when our cheeks were plump, our skin dewy and elastic, may well be behind us, but L’Oreal, P&G, Estée Lauder and other multinational giants of the beauty industry continue to battle ferociously for women’s gullibility, to produce the next new thing, because we’ve been told “we’re worth it.”
While we have moved on from slapping sheep’s wool, petroleum jelly and cow fat on our faces and bodies, beauty companies spend millions of dollars to bring new products into markets and into our dressing tables, and spend even more millions advertising them to self-regarding women prepared to be misled by vainglorious enticements.
Oh, for collagen! If you’re in your 40s and older, have dark pouches under your eyes, crow’s feet, jowly cheeks, blots and splotches, you will buy anything that promises to arrest the droop and lift the sag. If a $50 pot of cream can deliver its pseudoscientific claims to rejuvenate, correct, lift, smooth, regenerate and boost, we should genuflect in fervent gratitude before white-smocked researchers and scientists who concoct these potions with increasingly recherché ingredients.
Hope in a jar
We are blinded by science—pentapeptides, tretinoin, fullerenes, hyaluronic acid—that feeds us with wildly unrealistic notions. We know they promise more than they deliver, but we buy them regardless. Hope in a jar.
“The idea created by many of these products is that collagen (substance binding skin cells together, giving skin plumpness and elasticity; it declines with age) can get through the upper layers of skin into the dermis and reinforce our natural collagen is preposterous. The simple fact is that it’s a huge molecule and skin is designed to keep such substances out,” said pharma sciences professor Richard Guy to The Times.
The good news is science advances all the time. Nanoparticles—80 times thinner than a strand of human hair—are being tried by leading cosmetic companies to facilitate the penetration of active ingredients into the skin and improve the effectiveness of serums and moisturizers.
The bad news is the pull of gravity is an oppressive constant. Aging is an unstoppable tide. While spirits may remain young, bodies grow old. Erosions of time are etched as lines on our faces, necks, hands; they are souvenirs from the front lines of our lives. Your face is a map of your life’s account.
The pressure to look evergreen, to stay youthful and fanciable to men, cannot always be borne with just good grace and humor. So what do we do? We cleanse, tone and moisturize; we Botox; our profiles lasered; nasal hair trimmed; eyebrows threaded; legs waxed; teeth whitened; hair and eyelashes extended.
We yo-yo from the Dukan diet, to the Atkins, the Henri Chenot, the cabbage to the fart diet. Always hungry, obsessing about food, with nothing to show for it except bad breath. With precious few hours in a day, we dye, wax, shave, sugar, epilate, depilate, snip, tweeze and pluck.
We spend so much time titivating ourselves that time literally flies out the window. We could be running corporations, writing blockbusters, inventing new gizmos, and enjoying the shade of a leafy tree in the time it takes us to prod and poke, primp and pamper ourselves. Aren’t you tired already?
The celebrated photographer Brigitte Lacombe has built a profession out of peering closely at female faces. “To me, physical beauty is not enough,” she said. “It’s not interesting. You want someone who will also be funny, moving and intelligent, who will have some contribution to bring, not just a look.”
Why should we be tyrannized when we could be at ease? Liberate and love yourself. Find your confidence and gaiety. Develop your personality. Take up a hobby, a cause that will change the community or other people’s lives in small but generous increments of kindness. Draw the line somewhere.