Tweaking the truth about our aging faces

I'll be fifty tomorrow, and there isn't a filter for that.

Today is the last day of my forties.

And I want to write about my aging face. Not just my aging face, mind you. Yours too. Because everyone, however old we are, has one, don’t they. We all have an aging face.

In your mid forties, though, if you’re female, this aging - albeit temporarily - accelerates. Like where the whole thing has been happening slowly and gradually and you still look pretty similar, suddenly there’s a surge and your face changes a lot. They say it’s the drop in oestrogen caused by perimenopause. Personally I think it must be a bit more complex than this or you’d be able to look at women and tell which ones had taken HRT and which ones hadn’t, just from their dewlaps. And I’m pretty sure you can’t. I’m pretty sure that, in real life at least, you can guesstimate most women’s (and men’s) age pretty accurately, regardless of whether they’ve taken HRT, and also regardless of whether they’ve had ‘tweakments’.

Left - real, right - not real

This false idea that HRT somehow preserves your youth has been knocking around ever since a lovely chap called Robert Wilson wrote a book called Feminine Forever in 1966. The entire thing is a love song to HRT, which Wilson explains can help women ‘remain feminine for life’, and, ‘continue their existence as women beyond their middle years’ (Wilson’s italics). His basic message is this: if you don’t take HRT you will become old and unappealing, your man won’t fancy you, and you therefore won’t even really be a woman any more, at all.

It later emerged that Wilson was on the payroll of a major pharmaceutical company selling HRT, but despite this revelation that his book was nothing more than a great big advertorial, it was a bestseller, the idea stuck and within a decade, HRT was the fifth most prescribed drug in America.

I think the idea took such a hold because it plays into our deepest fears, and offers an easy solution. As humans, watching gravity take hold of our faces is a memento mori, a reminder of our temporary state and inevitable demise. As women, it’s something even bigger, a fear not just of our own mortality, but of, worse still, carrying on being alive but deemed no longer interesting or relevant. Of being invisible. How wonderful that, in Wilson’s world, there’s a pill for all this.

Germaine Greer writes in ‘The Change’ that at menopause, ‘men lose interest in manipulating her femaleness: they no longer sniff around her . . . The change hurts.” This is liberating, even though it may take some adjustment, “Like a person newly released from leg-irons, the freed woman staggers at first”, says Greer. “For the first time in her life she finds that she has to raise her voice or wait endlessly while other people push in front of her.” Not being ‘sniffed around’ any more, can come as a shock, a loss, a relief.

As a woman who was sniffed around a great deal, I have noticed it fall away recently in the manner of Larkin’s coastal shelf. I know that many women find the male gaze threatening or irritating but, for the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and at times, exploited it. “Go and flutter your eyelashes Milli”, people would say to me if the car had broken down or there wasn’t a table in the restaurant. And I used my youthful beauty as currency, not realising it would one day run out.

Left and centre - not real, right - real

I also think I didn’t fully realise how much it was just the way I looked that was the attraction. Somewhere deep and unspoken I think I thought or hoped that men hung on my every word because I was also funny and interesting and clever. Now I realise that was not the case. It was absolutely only the way I looked. I am funnier and more interesting and cleverer now than ever, and they really aren’t remotely interested. That revelation has stung a bit. “The change hurts”.

Women who feel this loss of currency (in both senses of the word) can make various attempts to buy it back. In our online world, where many of us show our faces as part of our work or businesses, there are small adjustments we can make to boost our own confidence, and perhaps also - who knows - our sales or our reach. In every phone camera settings there are filters which can smooth our skin, tighten our jawline, widen our eyes and take off a year or five. In many of the apps there are further filters that can give us anything from a dewy glow to a full face of make-up, even if in reality, we just rolled out of bed.

For the past few years, I will confess I’ve used some of them from time to time. Nothing major, just an eyebag here or a blemish there…occasional little tweaks that make me look a little bit more mid forties than late forties. Why did I do it? Because it was tempting. Because it soothed my insecurities. Because it got more ‘likes’. I’ve decided to stop though, for this reason: I don’t think it’s healthy to deliberately create a disconnect in your own brain between the way you imagine yourself to look and the way you actually look.

I predict this could even develop into yet another label: ‘age dysphoria’. That feeling, not that your ‘assigned sex’ doesn’t match how you feel inside, but that your inner age and outer image are somehow fundamentally misaligned. The more you tweak your online image, the more your actual face in the mirror may feel like it’s not your true authentic self. But it is. Like it or not, it is.

Left - real, right - not real

So for one thing, I’ve decided to create, store and show real pictures of myself from now on, always. As well as not wanting to manipulate either the viewer or my own brain and sense of self, I also don’t want to look at photos in five or ten years time and think, wow, I look great…but then not know whether I’d applied a filter or not. I don’t want to lose track of me. I also don’t want to create any more pressure than already exists to adjust my face in real life, with botox, fillers, and…whatever the other multitude of options are. I’m not sure I want my face, online or off, to become a lie. I won’t judge you if you make different choices, by the way. It’s hard.

There’s a lot of talk about how menopausal women ‘don’t have any fucks left to give’ and how this is tough times for the men in their lives who suddenly find they are living with a woman who is much less tolerant. Again, this is oft explained as being largely down to oestrogen depletion. As Caitlin Moran puts it in this very funny article, menopause is rather like a come-down from drugs or a sobering up, in which, rather than it being the case that hormones are making us angry, it’s the opposite: “It’s that the menopause has stopped her being so blithe and forgiving. It’s uncovered her actual personality and thoughts, underneath all the hormones. This is a very important distinction.”

There’s probably some truth in this, but what I don’t hear being discussed as much is whether our male partners begin relating to us differently as our faces change - just as the wider world does. If we are thirty and bathed in oestrogen and we ask them to do something about that leak in the roof, does it land completely differently to the same request from a fifty five year old? And what is this like for women, to suddenly feel that they are Sybil to John Cleese’s Fawlty? The trope of the nagging wife is widespread, and they are always middle-aged, strong, opinionated, with a barren field of fucks. And the joke is supposed to be that poor men are stuck with them, but they can’t stand them.

I’m aware this isn’t a very romantic angle to raise - our men love us unconditionally, right? Hmmm. Well I’m pretty sure I’m going to get into trouble for even saying it, but if we can all agree that the wider patriarchal world treats post-menopausal women differently, ignoring them, mocking them or disrespecting them (if they even see them at all), might it not also be possible that our male partners also relate to us in a…er…new way? In other words, whilst our lack of oestrogen may be making us less tolerant of our other halves, might it also be true that the change in how we look is making our other halves less tolerant of us?

Might it even be true that, given the chance, most men would prefer to be partnered with a younger woman, more tolerant and yes, perhaps for them, more tolerable? We know that most of the rich and famous men in this world date far younger women: the ones who don’t are treated as outliers - Pierce Brosnan, Hugh Grant - “isn’t it amazing that they’ve been together for thirty years”, people coo at such rare anomalies, as if these men have made the ultimate sacrifice.

And what about women? Do we really find older men as sexy or sexier than the fresh-faced? I’m reminded of a friend’s tale of online dating in her late 40s, a project she abandoned after she went to bed with a fifty something bloke and was haunted by memories of ‘his bald head bobbing up and down’. Dating a man in his twenties or thirties was not only unlikely but not particularly appealing either, she thought - who wants to be the mother figure, forever feeling lost for conversation or anxious about the bedroom lighting. She concluded that being single was preferable.

Left - not real, right - real

The truth is there’s no easy, one-click solution to all of this. Our world values youth, especially in women, and, certainly when it comes to sexual attraction, many of us, male and female, are drawn to the superficial enjoyment of a fresh young body and face. I guess as I end this piece this is the time you might be hoping I’ll reach a nice conclusion and tell you that getting older brings a peace, brings a wisdom, and that it’s all alright really because it’s so great to be happy in your skin, finally. Or that older women can also be beautiful (they can). But that’s probably a bit too twee and easy. As I say goodbye to my forties, sure, there are plenty of gains, but there’s are losses, too. My nice taut jawline is one of them. It’s not the end of the world, but I miss it sometimes. We can tweak our pictures, but we haven’t yet found a way to tweak reality, and the reality is, I probably have less of my life left than I’ve had, and some of the next bit might be a bit less carefree. Yes, I’m more confident now, and sure in myself, but that doesn’t always make me feel fully compensated for the mortality hit represented by the changes to my face.

Maybe the answer is simply honesty. Being honest if we tweak our pics, or even tweak our faces, so that others don’t have to wonder why we’re aging so well and they are not. Being honest about how we feel about aging, and, dare I say the word, death. Because the two are kind of related, and in trying to tweak away the former with a fancy filter or a bit of botox, we’re also clearly trying to tweak away the latter. And we can’t. Even a filtered life lived online and mostly divorced from material reality and nature, can’t get us out of that one.

If we all talk really honestly about how we feel about all this - without filters, without tweaks, without trying to smooth over the cracks - then maybe just maybe, something might actually shift. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and here’s to my fuck it fifties!! x

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