I was in a shop changing room last week, where the lighting shows up the truth, and couldn’t help but notice that I had a turkey neck, dangly cheeks, wrinkles everywhere, a chest spattered with senile warts and skin with that all-over dry, papery effect, like a recently sloughed snakeskin. Of course I tried things on, but if you are a repulsive old crone, no garment can help you, so I sat down on my ghastly sagging bottom and wept. For five whole minutes.
But what do I expect? I am 64 this month and I am getting old. Really old. I know it because my peers have begun to keep their false teeth in beakers in the bathroom and have handrails next to the toilet. And what is wrong with getting old? Nothing. It’s normal and perhaps I wouldn’t feel this grim if the papers weren’t stuffed with either the young and beautiful, or old women pretending to be young and beautiful. No wrinkled old bats allowed.
This isn’t a new complaint. Women have moaned on about the lack of older women in the media for decades, but now things are getting more desperate. Even deeply beautiful women are being snipped, sliced, stitched up, pumped up, siphoned off — as if there is no life after the first wrinkle.
I recently spotted a picture of Charlie’s Angels — Farrah Fawcett, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith — alongside a piece about the Emmy Awards. Two pictures, actually. One taken now and one taken 30 years ago. But something odd was going on. I couldn’t be certain, of course, because the necks in the early photos were almost covered, and the older necks were bared, but to me, those necks looked the same. They had no wrinkles at all. The more recent necks are now 57, 59 and 59 years old, but they are baby-bottom smooth. And all their faces are smooth as cream, except — wait! La Fawcett has wrinkly eyelids.
It has been widely reported that Fawcett has had surgery; I’ve no idea whether Jackson and Smith have resorted to such measures, but surely women who are about to turn 60 aren’t meant to look like this?
What is the matter with women who resort to surgery? They must be beautiful for ever, from birth to corpse. There was a time when women were ashamed of being that vain. They at least pretended they hadn’t had a facelift. Take Wallis Simpson, for example. At first it was only her photos that were retouched. Then it was her. She had three facelifts and Cecil Beaton described her as ”a mad Goya … Her face so pulled up that the mouth stretches from ear to ear.”
Now people almost brag about it. Here comes Cindy Crawford, chatting about her Botox treatments. For years she’s been banging on about natural beauty, promoting her own range of cosmetics to ”diminish visible signs of ageing”, but now she’s 40 and those signs are more visible, she’s had to Botox them away.
And here’s Linda Evangelista on the cover of American Vogue, standing in a wind tunnel. She has to be. Pregnant at 41 and her skin a miracle of smoothness. She uses Botox, although she does like ”to keep some movement” in her face. Well, goodee. And this is the Age Issue of Vogue, featuring ”smoother skin, better sex, [and] an ageless body”. Why do smooth skin and better sex go together? What if one has a blemish or two? Is the sex then hopeless? Anyway, it says in Vogue that human growth hormone can smooth those wrinkles, but it also warns that it can speed up any little budding cancers you may have. That’s a bit of a risk. Will you be pretty first, or dead?
It is a generally accepted fact that old age stinks, and in some ways it does. My top lip is disappearing, my whiskers are growing, my hair is grey and my moles are mushrooming, but would I give a toss if beauty wasn’t so vital and wrinkled women were all over the papers? Probably a bit, but not quite as much.
It might sound as if I’m blaming these celebrity women for letting the side down, but it’s not their fault. They have to make a living, and if that living is Hollywood, then they’re part of a brutal industry. Look at Teri Hatcher, who plays Susan in Desperate Housewives. She admits to having had Botox and collagen injections in the past.
Whoever thought she needed to be any thinner and smoother? What sort of mad world do we live in with loads of us busting with fat, loads more starving to death and another load chopping themselves into what some greedy Hollywood executive decides is the way women ought to look? Because we don’t like it. Hatcher doesn’t like it any more. ”I haven’t had anything done to my face in over a year and I don’t plan to,” she told Glamour magazine recently. ”It needs to be okay to have wrinkles.” Hurrah.
Perhaps the worm is turning at last. The Rolling Stones have wrinkles — they are chaps, but I see a glimmer of hope. Supermodels who have had babies, such as Kate Moss, Stella Tennant and Christy Turlington, are now in their 30s, and although fairly wrinkle-free, they are still with us. They are being allowed to continue to model. ”It’s not the return of supermodels,” says Alber Elbaz, head designer at Lanvin. ”It is the return of personality.” Good for Elbaz. It’s a small step in the right direction.
But we have a long fight on our hands. I notice in my daughter’s Cosmopolitan that there are six pages of adverts for cosmetic surgery in the classifieds. Just say no, everyone. Join my campaign to stop the Hollywood moguls and the plastic surgeons growing richer, while women are driven thinner, smoother and madder. Then we can all grow old in peace. — Â