Leaning into Getting Older Looks

Recent research showed that the body ages with quite a pronounced decline in two stages: one when you are 44, and one when you are 60. It’s science, but many of my friends have confirmed this anecdotally and at first, I just nodded and smiled. Trotted out the usual stuff about beauty being skin deep, in the eye of the beholder, it’s inside that counts; but from the vantage point that in the main, I thought I looked okay. Either that, or I was in denial.

Then I had to fish out a document I needed for travel, and the photo of myself is not only deeply and importantly unflattering, but, BOOM, was taken exactly one month before I turned 60, in 2021. Now in the weird, mind-reading way of the internet - even though I had not bellowed, near my music listening device, how effing old I had become - I started to get loads of ads for facial treatments and tweakments and fillers and all that stuff my ‘Sisterhood is Powerful’ mindset had always brushed away with scorn, the casual dismissal of the young and okay-looking. Hilariously, I got a meme that went something like: Mirror: I look great. Shop window: she could use some sleep. Security camera at shop: t’was winter when she contracted the cholera.

Hard relate. Was it not me, but the reflections and photos I looked at, which were so ugly?

Yes, I knew the strangely angled camera could account for me suddenly looking like the portrait of Dorian Gray, but it still bugged the hell out of me, because in the prior picture I looked entirely different. No droops, no excess baggage under the eyes. I looked very like someone I used to know, unaware of what time and gravity would do to my face formerly known as mine. I also know that passport and travel document camera settings have one called Total Humiliation. Just to the right of the one that reads, Make the Passport Control Person laugh in a derisory way.

My cousin’s words rang in my ageing ears: ‘You really look a lot like Bobba.’ Bobba being our chronically depressed grandmother, whose looks I had never really clocked, apart from the misery etched on her jowly face, lips always pursed in preparation for a new complaint. She was just always OLD. When did this happen to ME? When I turned 60.

Both slowly and at times, seemingly overnight, I was turning into my morose (and long time, actually dead) nan. My own mum, a great beauty not only to my eyes but to many others - apparently popped me out with this Skip-a-Generation DNA. I never got to look like her. When she was still alive - and I noted this to her - I quoted a Smiths’ lyric while comparing photos of her at the age I was then, 60. It’s time the tale were told, of how you took a child, and you made them old. and she looked at me quizzically and asked for a yogurt. Yes, I know the song is about child molesting but it suited me to use that bit of the song to sort of say, poetically, Yo, Ma, what the hell happened to my face? Why did nobody WARN me about this? Did you have a bit of a nip here and a tuck there, without telling anyone? I never found out. A few months later she was dead, taken swiftly by a cancer none of us, including her, knew about.

So, you know, in the aftermath, I didn’t really give a hoot about my face, or as the Brontes say, my countenance. I had way too many other things to figure out. And also - the way the death of a loved one does - made me very aware of my own mortality. I better start having some fun before I pop my clogs. And this I did, and continue to do, but I’m not here to tell you what a rich and beautiful internal world I inhabit, or how I feel loved, or what a wonderful and forgiving family I have and the comfort I find from Faith, and a wide circle of friends. I am here to write about bits of my physical body falling to bits - though even as I type this - I have three friends in hospital, two currently unable to use their lower body and one who has had both legs amputated. In the light of which, how can I be so shallow, when everything in my body works okay? In moments of clarity, I can see how ridiculous it is to CARE about my old boat race, when people my age have severe health issues, mobility issues and more. What does it matter that I look like a picture of misery and defeat in the Poundland self-checkout security camera? It’s not like I’m gonna nick a bottle of Brittany Spears perfume and then I would have to have a MUG shot, some other fresh photo hell, I am sure.

When I was younger, I didn’t bother too much about my looks. I never got by on them, and I didn’t worry about ageing because I was always told I looked young for my age. And I thought I did, as well. The way I looked was not really on my radar and that’s probably because I thought I looked alright. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t do the sun. Stayed slim. Fairly fit. And while not one to dress flamboyantly, I did feel at my best in a long, tight dress, preferably red. I could glam it up if the mood struck me, but it rarely did.

I think I looked okay at 44, the first age of droop, or I was too busy with my kids and work to notice what was happening to me physically? And at early 59, I actually felt like something approaching pretty. I mean I must have done because I went into selfie overdrive, particularly during lockdown. I worked out the more flattering angles, and that the specs I am so reliant on were my friend, covering up, somehow, through reflection or something, the excess baggage under my eyes.

I was noticing the friends around my age, who still looked young and beautiful. Was there something they were not telling me? Why no wobble under their jawlines? Why no creases on the forehead? Why no jowls, why no shortening and thickening of the neck?

I developed various girl crushes on women who did not seem to age. Katie Puckrik. My friend Justine, who has smoking wrinkles but brilliant bone structure. Antonella. Helen. June. Fran. Caroline. Jo. Sybil. Nicky. My friend Liz in America. Tracy (15 years younger than me, but still looks about 25) Beautiful film stars I did not trust because I reckoned they had had “work” done.

Every time I saw Katie I asked, ‘What do you do to look that good? Now?’ She said it was genes, and I am inclined to believe. But I felt surely not everyone could be as lucky as Katie. Were they popping off for ‘subtle’ surgical or injectable adjustments, or had they been on a really good holiday, or the posh bit of Boots? I was too polite to ask, and they were too polite to tell, if indeed, there was anything to tell. Selfie videos of a gal I used to know showed her lips plumping up to the size of facial buttocks. A very pretty girl, but what prompted her to get her lips injected to their own postcode proportions? Was it unsisterly to even think such a thing?

I had an inclination to examine how I looked with that that hateful, forensic and unforgiving eye that women of any age use when they look at an unfortunately brutal passport photo, or notice that (in my case) MALE pattern bald spot at the back of the head. A sudden lip of flesh slipping out between the bra and underarm. A distinct change of hair texture - healthy brown curls turning to grey frizz. The slackening of the jawline. The big round face of youth, which caused me to suck my cheeks in at every photo opportunity, now at the mercy of gravity. The only redemption of the jowls being, able to do a passible Nixon impression, which is meaningless to anyone under 50.

And this bugged the shit out of me until three of my friends developed life-changing conditions. All three, for the foreseeable, bedbound, immobile, and unable to do lots of things they used to be able to do without thinking. Suddenly, for them, very little things meant a lot. Being able to sit up. Being able to grasp a cup. Being able to visualise a future that looked better than the present. And all three accepting the new normal with grace and humour. What horrendous self-obsession possessed me, this focus on a face that used to be young, no longer being young?

There was a solution. Focus on the positive. Attempt cheerfulness. Don’t take selfies, and don’t look in the mirror unless applying a bit of make-up. Age happens. It means you are alive, which is better than the alternative.

Now, the document I am using for travel has become redundant. I can see it is a moment in time, bad lighting, lack of sleep, no makeup. Plus, with agoraphobic tendencies, I don’t travel a whole lot. A picture can capture a second in time, but it shows nothing of the spirit you can see in the eyes and smile and heart. These are the things to develop and cultivate. Looks do fade, but the spirit can grow stronger.

And another thing. Don’t EVER fish for compliments. You can’t trust your friends, or lover. As Nora Ephron writes so beautifully in her book of essays, ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’. She says if you draw attention to a feature you don’t like about yourself, the friend or lover will say, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’ And, she adds, they’d be lying. Because if they said, ‘Yeah, I see exactly what you mean, but if you think you are going to trap me into engaging on the subject, you’re crazy.’

But just because I can’t trust them, does not mean I don’t - in times of catching myself looking like a face only a mother could love - lap up those lies. At this stage of decrepitude, I’ll take what I can get. Right, I’m off to Boots to buy the latest expensive lying emollient. Anybody want anything?