Aging in The Ageless Era
did we fall through the looking glass?
Hello! I wanted to give a quick PSA that we are going to talk about physical appearance in today’s Substack newsletter. While it isn’t going to be shallow, we are going to be talking about a subject that could feel a little touchy for some. If you’re in a fragile place with body image, it could be a great time to save this newsletter for later. If you’re feeling targeted by anything you read, please know that I write from a respectful place and desire to empower and uplift other women with this discussion on aging vs. anti-aging. There’s a place for everybody here!
I recently realized that I’ve lost touch with being able to guess how old somebody is by looking at them. My best friend and I play a game where we send photos back and forth to test each other. My phone pings:
“How old do you think this person is?”
“....thirty-four?”
“Twenty-six!”
My turn. “Okay, how old do you think this person is?”
“Um...let’s go with twenty-four.”
“She’s thirty-eight. I’m not kidding!”
Suffice it to say, I usually lose this game. Every high school graduate looks to be in their mid-twenties, while every mother of a high school graduate looks to be roughly in their mid-twenties as well. I am confused by images. Are they genuine? Unedited? Photoshopped? AI-generated? And there are so many images all the time, coming at me in the online space, in movies, in all forms of media. Even in women I encounter in my daily life. This inability to guess age is a weird, second hand dysphoria which gets even worse when I look around at women I know to be roughly the same age as me, but whose apparent age is inscrutably youthful.
What do people even look like in their thirties?
I mean to say, I know what my own face looks like - I am aware of its appearance and texture and the way my expressive features have launched creases in my forehead and around my eyes that are becoming more permanent each year. “Do I look old?” I wonder. “I feel so young!”
I will be thirty-two years old this summer. That is so young; way too young to be wondering if I look old. However, it is also an age at which I am no longer twenty-two. Which is to say, I do not look like a teenager. I have spent a decade more in the sun than these twenty-two year-olds. I don’t regret this. But sometimes I steal a look at the women around me and wonder, how is a woman supposed to look in her thirties? Am I meant to look like them? Are they doing it right? Am I? Is there a wrong way?
It’s a well-known phenomenon that millennials are aging differently than our parents. A photo of my mom at thirty-two is going to look understandably different to a photo of me at thirty-two (she had four kids at that point, for one thing). But I don’t think we’ve hacked age in any particular way. I think we’re just choked on photographic representations of ourselves, and thus obsessed with reversing age.
I log on to Pinterest, Instagram, or the TikTok videos Andrew sends me, and all I see is high-gloss images and videos of women with pore-less, glowing, Riviera-looking skin. I have not gone out of my way to find these Amazons. They aren’t even on a search page of skincare or style. These women are reviewing books, or knitting a sweater. Teaching you how to set up a Roth IRA, or the best place to hunt ramps in Spring. They are smart and interesting and all ages and their skin is perfect and their eyelashes are perfect and their hair is perfect and their teeth are perfect and dear god even their nail beds are perfect. It has come to such a point that it seems one has to be conventionally hot to share a restaurant recommendation. Does anybody want to see a mid-looking woman in her forties sharing about the best burger spot? I mean, I would - that girl probably knows her stuff - but all the glowing princesses who hold lobster rolls aloft in slender, manicured hands are the ones who keep our gaze. Is that melted butter glistening along on their cheekbones, or whichever highlighter stick is currently going viral? We’ll never know.
Do I sound jealous? I think it’s more sinister than that; what I begin to feel when I spend too much time online is a frisson of comparison splintering apart my self-confidence. It is hard to maintain a healthy body image when surrounded by images of women who, for all intents and purposes, don’t even look the way they look. What do I mean? Well of course there are some anomalies in the gene pool who are just ridiculously good looking without additional help. But we have to talk about something: women are getting Botox and face lifts, lip-fillers, cheek fillers, nose jobs, hair extensions, body sculpting, lash lifts, lash extensions, hair colorants, and sporting expertly-applied makeup. These are no longer fringe-y beauty measures. Everybody, it seems, is doing something.
Nothing is inherently wrong with any of these things, but we have to understand that the images we get, blooming vividly in the center of a ring light, are not how these people genuinely look. When I scroll through Instagram and compare myself to many of the women in the app, I am more than likely comparing myself to people who have augmented their beauty with many of these processes. And boy are they beautiful! It is, however, unfair to compare my own appearance to that of someone who has gone the route of getting work done.
I was discussing this with a friend via the Marco Polo app. “I know I want to take care of myself and age gracefully, whatever that looks like,” I told her. “I just didn’t expect to feel conflicted when it started happening.”
She responded with the level of thoughtfulness I’ve grown to appreciate from her: “I think it’s because these kinds of beauty procedures used to be something we all knew celebrities got done, so we knew not to compare ourselves to them. But now they’re available for normal people and it’s really hard to know what’s real, even among people we see in public.”
Add this the onslaught of AI-generated faces and bodies, and how can you even be sure anyone’s appearance is real? Not long ago I was skimming Pinterest for haircut inspiration, admiring saved images of a perfect, wavy French bob I’ve always wanted but can’t seem to achieve. For the first time I noticed something: that hair in that photo was AI generated. The entire face belonged, not to a real person with attainable style, but to a figment of the computer’s imagination. Dove Beauty has an incredible guide for creating diversity among AI-generated images. The guide teaches how to write prompts specific enough to conjure images that show real-seeming people, complete with wrinkles, a range of body size and skin color, hair texture, and a plethora of other realistic and unconventionally beautiful physical attributes. Even if you work in a field that doesn’t use AI, here’s a link to the guide - it’s fascinating to read and consider.AI cannot create anything new, it can only provide images to connect with the words it is being fed. It makes sense, then, to write detailed and diverse prompts so that the technology will show accurate representations of the real humans inhabiting the world. When we feed AI air-brushed sounding words, it will generate air-brushed looking images, which in turn will feel increasingly like the standard of beauty. Not that we needed AI to tell us that beauty standards are unimaginatively narrow.
I’ve been comfortable for a long time with the idea that I want to let my body advance through life at a natural, well-taken care of pace. I am curious to see what I look like at each age. I don’t mean “letting myself go,” in terms of forgetting about the delight of adorning my body in ways that feel beautiful to me. I enjoy skincare and style. I wear makeup (though not expertly applied), and I like to get pedicures. These are all forms of “participating in the beauty industry.” It’s not that I don’t think we should take part in rituals surrounding our appearance that bring us joy. It’s just that....do the rituals we participate in really delight us, or are they tasks we feel we must do to keep up a staunch defense against time?
Although I’ve made my choice to take a minimally-invasive approach to the way I will age, I’ve been surprised by my own internal pushback against the ways my body changes. On a basic level, I want to look like women my age. I think this is a pretty natural desire. I have no raging desire to look younger than I am (remember, roughly thirty-two is young!), but many women who are, by my best calculations, in their thirties do look younger than I look. It is disorienting.
I am happy with my choice, but sometimes I look around and feel alone in my choice. Off-screen, the women in my real life keep pace together. Various ones color hair, tint brows, get waxed or lasered. I don’t think these women have gone in for more extreme measures, like Botox and nose jobs. I don’t think they’re body-sculpting, applying retinol, getting biweekly spray tans, paying through the nose for hand-tied hair extensions...but would we discuss it if they were?
The best kept, wide-open secret of womanhood is the measures we each take to look like ourselves. We all know there is a finessed routine, but except in rare instances, we don’t talk about the routine. For some, the list is short. For others, it is long. My mom tells me about a woman she knew who took off her makeup each night after her husband fell asleep, and woke up each morning before him to put it back on again. The scariest thing this woman could imagine was being seen barefaced by the man who loved her. Can you imagine how much freer it would feel to be candid as a culture about the ways we tend to our bodies?
Hypothetically, I think women should be able to indulge in whatever beauty routines they desire. The issue, for me, comes when what I’d like to do is none of these things, and what I feel I have to do is thirteen of them. As vulnerable as it is to say, I am easily made insecure by comparing my appearance to that of other women. I want her hair, and her lashes, and her toned legs. I want her hairless arms, her highlights, and her extraordinarily white teeth. And rather than admiring these qualities in the other women the way I’d admire any other beautiful image, I am gripped by sinking guilt. Should I look like that?
Should I be doing everything I can to try to look like that?
I don’t want to do those things, but when I compare appearances, it almost feels like a duty.
Am I allowed to exist raw and natural and un-fixed?
Am I allowed to be here with permanent lines in my forehead, imperfect teeth, sun-spotted hands, thin lips, rogue facial hairs, squishy body (not from childbirth), pale skin, un-dyed hair (I like it brown!), and a few scars? Furthermore, am I allowed to exist like this at my young age? Should this be an appearance I save for, I don’t know, fifty? Then I look at women who are fifty and beyond and I see the same achingly earnest adherence to The List. I go out with women who are retired, on the verge of becoming grandmothers, and still dieting. My phone hears me talk about my changing skin type with a friend and offers curated clean-beauty products just for me. I get sucked into the vortex and order an antioxidant balm. It feels nice, it smells nice, but it didn’t give me a new face.
Appearance doesn’t really matter. I know it does not. It is not what I admire most about the dozens of women in my real life. I admire their courage, tenacity, integrity, humor, joy, belief. And I so badly want to be above feeling any conflicting emotions about a choice I’m proud of and excited about: the choice to let myself age. (Can you hear how insane this is? That I’m proud of a choice to do to the inevitable?) And yet, I’m human, and a woman, and in frail moments of dying vanity I think, “I don’t look like the women who look like that,” and it troubles me. But only for a moment.
This is what it means to be embodied: that we will age. And though I haven’t aged very much yet, I am trying to take the time to learn why I find it an occasionally-uncomfortable choice. (If we want to get into the theological side of things, I’d say it’s because we’re not made to be temporal creatures, so the temporal world rubs us the wrong way. Entropy is inevitable. But in eternity we’ll get new bodies, so that’s cool!)
The answer to beginning to age gracefully, of course, isn’t in railing against anti-aging campaigns and celebrity face injections (although I have thoughts). The answer is in existing just as I am. I am what it looks like to be in my thirties. My genes, my story, my personality: these are the factors that make me look the way I look. And maybe more than anything, the answer to this tension lies in stepping away from our image-obsessed, visually-charged lives online. I have “diversified my feed” with women of all ages, body types, ethnicities, and lifestyles. Still, when I hang out too long online I lose touch with a sense of my own beauty. I become a lengthy sum of people I don’t resemble. I am referential at best, a harsh critic at worst.
Oh, but when I step away, I love the curiosity of letting life unfold across my body. My forehead lines and eye crinkles have come from a lifetime of surprised and delighted expressions. My body is soft and gentle and patient. My hands are strong from the sun. My teeth are imperfect because I lost my retainer after having braces as a child. My husband and I still joke that we’ve found it each time we pass the intersection where my grandmother’s car (and with it, the retainer) was totaled. I love my smile, thin lips and all. And when I part my hair in the center and French braid it, you can see a few threads of silver running through the braid. I don’t mind. I love dressing in bright colors, in clothes I enjoy rather than think “flatter me.” I will always apply eyeliner in bold black wings when I’m feeling fresh, and put on an inadvisable amount of blush. I indulge in high quality skincare products because I love the way they feel on my face. When I massage them into my skin at night I am reminded that I am here, and real, and full of life.
Let’s be here, and real, and full of life together. We are what it means to be women, and beautiful, and the age we might be.
