Have we reached peak tweakment?
The price we REALLY pay when we over-tamper with our faces...
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On Sunday afternoons I watch old movies. Mainly the good, gritty stuff from the 1960s and 70s. A Woman Under The Influence, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Un Homme and Une Femme, that sort of thing. It’s very hard to get hold of films like these any more. I suppose they’ve fallen out of favour. Glossier, sexier things with zippy storylines seem to be all the rage nowadays.
My husband often asks me why it is I liked these slow, ordinary films about ordinary lives. I never had a good answer before. Now I think I know why: it’s the faces of the people in them.
The protagonists of these films have faces like topographic maps. There are long furrows down their foreheads and gentle creases around their mouths when they smile. When Gena Rowlands wails into the screen- which she does often, her face is as beautiful as a crumpled piece of old silk. I’m starting to miss faces like these; faces that feel like relics of a time gone-by.
I looked at my own face this morning. ‘Look at my chin,’ I wail to my husband, making a cartoonish face in the mirror so that it sags and dimples. He smiles and shakes his head.
‘No one sees your face like that,’ he says, walking downstairs to go and make toast.
I should have known this would happen. The woman who sometimes gives me shots of Botox between my eyebrows told me that the chin starts ‘to go’ in your mid-40s. I brushed it off because I have always had a very strong jaw. A boy in college once said I had a ‘face like a hammerhead shark’. I was upset back then, but now I think a jaw like that might rescue me from ‘old lady chin’.
Except it has not.
So now I spent my days peering at other women’s jawlines.
‘Do you think she’s had a face lift?’ I ask my husband as we watch Fiona Bruce on the television. She is investigating whether a man in rural France has a stack of Toulouse Lautrec drawings in his attic. It is very exciting stuff, except I am too distracted by Bruce’s chin which is smooth and taut.
I know he is trying to watch the program, but I press on. This has become something of a skill I’ve developed as I’ve become older: the inability to know when the conversation is over.
‘I mean LOOK at it…’ I say with mock indignation. ‘She has a baby’s chin! She’s at least ten years older than me. She must have had one.’
He is not playing this game, which is sensible because it invariably leads back to me and my own face. And he knows where that leads. Also I’m not entirely sure he does think Fiona Bruce has had a face lift.
Recently I have started staring at women on the tube. And at the post office. And even on the dog walk, but that’s very hard to do because most people wear big, thick scarves or balaclavas nowadays so they could be hiding anything under there. I was staring so hard at the face of the woman behind the till at the Esso garage the other day that she asked me which cigarettes I’d like to buy.
Because here’s the thing: it’s almost impossible nowadays to know what a 46-year old face looks like anymore. Or a 56-year old face. Or even, a 20-something face. Everyone has been so tampered with- by Botox and fillers and acids and painted on eyebrows and fat being sucked out of cheeks and hair extensions that give even the most withered of locks all the volume and zhuzh of a 17-year old prom queen.
For the record, I’m vehemently in agreement that a woman/man can do whatever they choose to their face. I myself have had Botox and peels and other bits and pieces over the years. Most of it long since dissolved now but still, I was here for all of that. But the idea used to be to ‘freshen’ oneself up. Still look like a 46-year old woman, just one who looks like they’ve had a lot more sleep than everyone else.
But recently no one looks fresher anymore. They look frozen, not in time exactly, because that would suggest they look a certain age, but frozen into some sort of age-less state; like marionette puppets waiting to have their strings pulled.
On week nights my husband and I like to watch Love Island Island together. I know we’re probably too old for all that (he is 50, I am 46), but still, we enjoy reality television with his villains and heroes and the sort of storylines that can only come from real people doing stupid things. But this time around it feels different. The women- who are all under the age of 35, look double the age of the men due to over-Botoxed, filler-manipulated faces that no longer obey the emotions of their owners. When someone cries on Love Island there is nothing. No crumpled chin or downturned mouth (because every pair of lips on there look like over-stuffed bolster cushions). I used to feel sorry for some of the kids in the Love Island villa, cooped up like prize chickens, judged only by the size of their buttocks and the colour of their hair. But now, watching some of these faces get upset is as moving as watching a raindrop fall down a Picasso bust. You feel nothing - no connection, no empathy, no desire to scoop them up in your arms and tell them ‘it’ll all come out in the wash, dear’. As such the show now feels weird and empty- like peering into the saddest Barbie house on earth.
I felt the same way watching Babygirl a few weeks back. Nicole Kidman is one our finest actresses but I was far too distracted by her ‘chaw’ to fully engage with the film. I have seen a lot of this recently by the way: chins and jaws transformed into one giant bullfrog-mass due to injudicious filler being applied to the jaw area to even out can ‘sag’. See also Melania Trump. Obviously I’m not saying either of these women have had this done, but, well….there’s definitely something disobeying the laws of the 50-something chin with both of them. )
I think our faces have had enough. Truly. Things like Russian Doll Lips and Keyhole Pouts and buccal fat removal are not just changing how we look, they’re changing how we connect with the world. The big-lipped, full-cheeked, smooth-skinned, bouncy-jawed aesthetic the world now dreams of is essentially the aesthetic of the newborn baby. But anyone over the age of 4 wielding that sort of face feels wrong. Not on a moralistic level you are to understand, but on a physiological one. Age doesn’t just give you lines and sag, it bestows on you a whole way of being. Your body becomes more expressive - flailing hands, shrugged shoulders, slapping your palm against your side leg when something tickles you beyond laughter. (What? Just me???). But marrying that up with a face that looks preternaturally young scrambles the brain. The effect of which is not beauty but otherness. And that’s a hard thing to connect with.
But here’s something even more unsettling, numerous studies over the years have shown that the smoothing out of age through surgical intervention can, in some cases, stop the individual from feeling extremes of emotions. Intense joy, sadness, anger even…are frozen out since the brain needs signalling from the requisite muscles associated with those feelings. And so smoothing out age doesn’t just change how the world sees us, it transforms the way we connect with that world too.
I think this is why I love France, and old French films so much. The faces of the men and women in France are real. They are age-spotted and lined and the woman all have ginormous rivulets that run along their lips from years of Gauloises consumption. People look their age in France.There are hundreds of sagging jaws and dimpled chins and cheeks that fall flat against beautiful cheekbones. It makes age acceptable, it shows what faces should and can do from years of laughter and smiling and just getting through life. Tweakments happen there, for sure, but the French have enough national swagger to know when to stop. It is rare, for example, to find a face that looks like a Francis Bacon in France- in London I know see nothing but nowadays. When the woman at the boulangerie smiles at me, I know she means every greying tooth of it. It makes me and my chin very happy indeed.
I loved this, Farrah. I stare in the mirror and I wonder what it might look like if things were just 'pulled up' a bit, but the trouble is I KNOW it wouldn't look like it does when you hoik those saggy bits up in the mirror. It would look like these women, who don't look like themselves any more. They don't look younger, they just look like they haven't got wrinkles. It makes me so sad that some of the world's most beautiful women, who really could have been role models for beautiful older women, have had interventions which turn them into someone - something - else. But I do worry that by refusing to go down this route, I'm the one who's going to look odd, like I don't care, unkempt, 'undone'. Will no treatments mean that I'll look like I need a good iron......
I’m 76 now and never had any other treatment than an occasional facial. Honestly it’s better to own your age rather than fret about your looks ( though have to say you look gorgeous Farrah)