You can be perfectly happy with your face until someone points out something you apparently need to fix. The faint lines around your eyes. The grey hairs multiplying at your temples. The jawline that isn’t quite where it was ten years ago. Suddenly, things you barely noticed have names, treatments and entire industries devoted to making them disappear.
Ageing has become strangely difficult to do without commentary.
There is always something new we are supposed to be correcting. Botox before the wrinkles arrive. Treatments to tighten what has started to soften. Serums promising to turn back the clock. Hair colour at the first sight of grey. Even photographs are routinely filtered until the person staring back at us looks vaguely familiar but noticeably younger.
None of this means there is anything wrong with wanting to look good. Taking care of your skin, exercising, eating well, colouring your hair or having a treatment can all be personal choices. The question is when looking after yourself quietly turns into an endless attempt to erase every visible sign that you’ve lived.
Because somewhere in all this anti-ageing, we seem to have forgotten what actually comes with age.
Experience. Confidence. Perspective. Knowing who you are. Knowing what you will tolerate and, perhaps more importantly, what you won’t.
Yet physically, we are constantly being encouraged to travel in the opposite direction. A 45-year-old woman is complimented because she could “pass for 30.” Someone in her 50s is told she looks amazing because she “hasn’t aged.” The compliment is well intended, but the message underneath it is interesting: looking your actual age is somehow less desirable.
It is particularly exhausting for women because the goalposts keep moving. First, you are supposed to be beautiful. Then slim. Then fit but not too muscular. Then youthful. Then naturally youthful, because looking as though you’ve had too much work done is also frowned upon. So you are expected to age without appearing to age and, ideally, without anyone being able to tell how you managed it.
That’s quite an assignment.
Social media hasn’t helped. We aren’t simply comparing ourselves with younger women anymore; we are comparing ourselves with digitally improved versions of women our own age. Skin is blurred, waists are adjusted, faces are lifted and under-eye bags disappear with a swipe. Even video filters have become sophisticated enough to follow our faces while we move.
The strangest part is when we begin comparing the person in the mirror with the person on our own Instagram page.
Perhaps the better question isn’t how young we can continue to look, but how good we can continue to look as ourselves.
There is a difference.
A woman in her 40s doesn’t need to look 25 to be beautiful. A woman in her 50s doesn’t need a completely line-free forehead to be attractive. And reaching 60 shouldn’t require an explanation for why your face has changed since you were 35.
Of course, ageing naturally doesn’t have to mean abandoning vanity either. There is a slightly irritating tendency to suggest that accepting age means throwing away the retinol, cancelling your hair appointment and embracing every grey hair with spiritual enthusiasm. It doesn’t.
You can love Botox. You can colour your hair. You can have a facelift if you want one. You can spend far too much money on skincare and thoroughly enjoy doing it. The point isn’t that women should stop trying to look younger. It is that looking younger shouldn’t become the only acceptable way to look good.
There is something incredibly elegant about a woman who has figured out what works for her now rather than trying desperately to recreate herself from twenty years ago. Healthy skin. Great hair. Clothes that fit beautifully. A strong body. Good posture. Energy. Confidence. None of these requires pretending time hasn’t passed.
And perhaps that is where our definition of ageing well needs to change.
Instead of being impressed that someone “doesn’t look her age,” maybe the bigger compliment is that she looks fantastic, full stop.
Because getting older will change your face. It will change your body. It may change the way you dress, what you care about and certainly how much nonsense you are prepared to tolerate.
Not all of those changes need fixing.
Some of them are actually the perks.
