Don't let them mess up your face

 

This is me, age 66. The rock star Madonna is two years younger than me, and I am stunned to realize after her appearance at the Grammys on the weekend that I now prefer my face to hers, so altered has hers become from years of cosmetic surgery and treatments.

This face of mine has been creamed, scrubbed, exfoliated, masked and otherwise fussed over for a very long time. I am as disappointed as any person who comprehends the social capital of physical attractiveness to be experiencing the unwanted changes that aging brings. 

But having watched one beautiful celebrity after another succumb to the disaster of costly and invasive "anti-aging" procedures, I concluded many years ago that I will never do anything beyond the superficial to try to appear younger. 

It's not out of any noble belief in being my "natural self." As you can see from my photo, my hair is coloured, and I am pretty sure it will be until the day I die. I wear eye makeup and have since age 12, and don't even leave the house for the morning dog walk without it on. I got my eyebrows tattooed in 2009 and love them. You'll never catch me singing the praises of a natural look. 

Nor is it out of a determination to grow old gracefully. If I could take a magic pill guaranteed to firm up my neck, jawline and eyelids with no side-effects, I would be seriously tempted, and admit to moments in front of the mirror in which I pull my face skin tighter and lament out loud about how much younger I look.

But here's the thing about invasive cosmetic procedures, as Madonna's 2023 face so tragically reminds us: It's a pact with the Devil. You're going to trade off your future old face for an "improved" face now, and you're going to do that repeatedly as the relentless aging process drags your skin lower to the ground no matter how many procedures you throw at it.

And then one day, you cross some line of having had way too many procedures, and there's no way back. Alas, you still don't look young, you just look like an aging woman who has had way too many cosmetic procedures. 

I get that celebrities must feel the pressure to keep up their beauty, though I would have thought more of them would have noticed by now that the work really dries up once your face starts looking altered (Melanie Griffith, I'm talking to you.)

But why I am seeing so many non-celebrities - and so many young women - getting sucked in? Don't they have eyes to see all the wealthy celebrities with their ruined faces? If famous, rich people with access to top-of-the-line surgeons still end up looking like unrecognizably bizarre cat-people with painfully distorted lips, isn't that a pretty blatant warning to any of us to just stay away from this crap?

We fight very hard to look younger than our age, as evidenced by a global anti-aging market now valued at $62.6 billion US and a $67 billion cosmetic surgery market. There are many theories about why that is so, from evil marketing strategies and ruthless capitalists to the patriarchy.

I know from my own experience that an aging woman no longer draws the Male Gaze (a sad-happy loss for me), and that ageism in your work life is a real thing. The world does view you differently, and makes many strange assumptions once having registered you as "old." I clearly remember the grand insult I felt back in my 50s when some twerp salesman at the computer store leaned in close to ask if I knew what a flash drive was.

But to cut, inject and fill your face with weird chemicals and poisons in reaction to the social realities of aging? And all of it to end up with a face so obviously distorted that you're literally the poster child for aging really, really poorly? What theory explains that?

If you are a younger woman reading this, and I hope you are, I will tell you straight up that it's painful to experience your physical beauty fading. Not to brush off the years of catcalls, unwanted attention and outright sexual harassment as an easy time for women, but being attractive does have its privileges. As someone who for so many years counted on turning heads to get me feeling good about myself, I've found it hard to relinquish the dopamine rush of being checked out.

But all the cosmetic procedures in the world won't change any of that. In fact, they only make things worse, because soon enough you just look like a freaky-faced woman with too much disposable income who is desperate to not look as old as you are. Who wants to be that person?

So embrace yourself as those visible changes creep in and get over it. We don't expect an old dog to look like a puppy. Stay fit, don't smoke, keep the alcohol to a minimum and drink lots of water. Spend some time contemplating the old women all around you and you'll see that it's possible to look good AND old at the same time. 

And let me assure you, there are a lot of perks to growing invisible. Count that one as a secret aging super-power.

Best legacy for Michelle is to keep this conversation going

   

    May the hills ring with our conversations about disordered eating in the wake of Michelle Stewart’s death. I know it would please her to think that we weren't just going to let that elephant in the room pass unnoticed.

    What I mostly know about the various disordered-eating illnesses is they aren't about disordered eating at all. Eat a lot, eat a little, obsess about burning it off, throw it up, fixate on it – food is ultimately just fuel for the body, but for some people it becomes a way to manage the bad feelings of your life. For me it seems almost like cutting, where the pressures of the world are all just a bit too much and so you seek a release within your control. For the "thin" disorders like anorexia and bulimia, it’s also got that complicated social aspect of netting the sick person more compliments for keeping themselves so slim.

    Positive feedback for negative behaviour. Not good. Pretty soon it’s a habit.

    When I consider my own few years with this problem as a young woman, I see a recipe that started with me as a little girl who already thought poorly of herself and had experienced an awkward stage around 10 or 11 of looking like a potato. I then got pregnant at 16 – a body-image nightmare – and inadvertently ended up with a doctor who was a freak about pregnant women keeping their weight down.

    Seven months in he told me that I had gained all 20 pounds I was allowed to gain. I walked out of his office and straight into disordered eating, becoming completely obsessed about not gaining an ounce for the final two months of my pregnancy. I would stay in that mode for the next six years, controlling my food intake with an iron hand until the day a passing stranger who I fancied saw me in a bathing suit and told me I looked like a starving person. 

    I don’t know what it was about that comment, but I heard it. I was 23. For the first time in years, I looked in the mirror later that day and saw the prominent hip bones and ribs, the gaunt look around my face.

    I never went back to those hungry days. But I have to admit that even now, when life’s problems overwhelm me – no job, no home, no car, dislocated in my own culture, the future unclear - the first thought to my head is that I have to lose some weight. I can write those words and think, whoa, what does that have to do with ANYTHING, but that doesn’t mean I can stop the thought from coming into my head. I’m almost 50 pounds heavier than I was when disordered eating had me in its thrall, but my inner anorexic has never really left.

    And like always, body weight questions in our society of plenty are double-edged swords for all of us – necessary to pay attention to for all kinds of health and aging reasons, bad to pay too much attention to.     Those who think we simply shouldn't talk about body weight need only look around at the growing girth of the developed world to know that’s not true either.

    So. No easy “cure,” unless one thinks that potato-shaped children, troubled lives and compliments for being slim are going to disappear anytime soon. If you have known the virtuous phase of a fast, you will also know the compelling feeling of clamping down on your own eating. It’s a siren’s call – brain chemicals, I suppose.

    The disordered eating is the symptom – a killer, insane-making, suicidal symptom, but still just the symptom. The reason for why we do it is something else entirely, and different for everybody. Any hope around treating this frustrating illness hinges on our ability to figure that piece out.

    I never had the chance to know Michelle Stewart in any kind of meaningful way, although we did have a handful of surprisingly deep conversations on Facebook when I was still in Honduras and she was in the last months of her life. I thought from the get-go that she had been enormously brave to confess to the world why she’d developed end-stage renal failure, because nobody would be expecting you to own up to three decades of anorexia and bulimia and she probably could have kept that truth hidden.

     But by refusing to, she invited us all to step forward into this debate, to peel back the layers on this issue and kick up the research and bring it into the full light where at least some of its baffling mysteries might be revealed.

    What can one person do? We can talk. Those of us who have been there and back can poke our heads out of our closets and at least lift some of the shame of this illness. Those who know this beast more personally need to find ways to share our experiences around where eating disorders come from – and more importantly, about how people leave them behind.

    Because they do. That’s where the hope is. I expect Michelle would love that, to think that hope might emerge as a result of the conversation started by her own sad and unnecessary death. 

Maybe it's the mirror: A reflection on body image
Dec. 1, 2006

Nobody in our household is quite sure when the happy mirror first arrived.
For the longest time, only my stepdaughter knew of its magical powers. The otherwise ordinary full-length mirror hung in her bedroom for years and I learned of its charms only after she moved away and left it behind.
I’ve known about the existence of bad mirrors for many years, of course, being well familiar with those kind. I can’t count the number of store dressing rooms that have broken my heart over the years with their bright lights and bad mirrors.
The happy mirror, on the other hand, tells a much different story to those who look into it. Wherever your body type and tendencies have taken you, it makes you look taller and thinner, and quite nicely proportioned. Your clothes look better. Your hair is neater. You look rested.
At first, I resisted its allure. A mirror that made you look good just seemed like too guilty of a pleasure after a lifetime of bad mirrors. I worried that it would swoon me into thinking I looked OK all the time. Heaven forbid.
But one day a few months ago, it just became obvious to my partner and I that we loved the happy mirror. There’s no denying the pleasure of walking by it as you breeze back and forth in the morning. The happy mirror sends you out the door feeling terrific.
Is it wrong to be so caught up with the image in the mirror? We’ve loved mirrors for a long, long time: first as ponds, then polished metal, and now as treated glass. For better or worse, we are fascinated by our own reflections.
I have no real idea what I’m looking for when I glance in a mirror. I suppose I want to see the person I present to the world. It’s an effective tool for steely-eyed assessment and reconsideration - for getting the poppyseed out of your teeth, the mascara off your nose, your clothes aligned.
The happy mirror, on the other hand, is like having a kind-hearted person on hand at all times to warmly declare that you look really good. Stubby and thick around the middle? Not a bit. Slouching and pot-bellied? Nope. You’re just right.
That women loathe their bodies is nothing new. Any number of theories have been put forward to explain that - media images, social conditioning, marketing. What isn’t in dispute, however, is that what we see in the mirror continues to matter to us.
I searched on “Why do I hate my body?” in Google this week and came up with page after page of Web sites devoted to the question.
Some encourage continuing to hate your body by naming which part bugged you the most, while others denounced the fixation with body image and put the blame on the patriarchy, corporations and oppressive social conditions. One blogger wrote that she used to hate her body, but now hates “the forces that conspire to make you hate your body.”
But has anyone considered the role of the humble mirror in all of this? Could it be that we were happier when there were only pond surfaces and the warm glances of passing strangers to convey to us how we looked?
Up until the late 1800s, mirrors weren’t so hot. The techniques to make them were far from perfect, and the materials were a challenge. Then a German chemist invented silvering and the modern mirror was born. Life would never be the same.
These days, we check ourselves in countless mirrors as a matter of course. The one in the bedroom. The one in the bathroom. The car’s rear-view. Shiny glass buildings. Staff washrooms. Elevators. Mirrors greet us at every turn, passing their opinion on how we look with no regard for whether we want to know.
Before I came upon the happy mirror, I thought I was condemned to always finding some aspect of myself wanting in my reflection. I suspected that that it was one of those garden-variety issues related to self-esteem and body image, perhaps related to some inner psychological tripwire from my childhood I hadn’t worked out yet.
Never once did I wonder if it was the mirrors.
But to experience the happy mirror is to realize that you are whatever the mirror says you are. And if it says you cut one fine figure, you do. A lifetime of bad mirrors at every turn has left us believing the worst of ourselves. But that’s nothing that a good mirror can’t fix.
We don’t have to look for our personal truths in bad mirrors. We can seek out happy mirrors - pass a regulation requiring them in all public places, even. No more disappointments.
What’s the worst that could happen? We’d start every morning believing that we looked great. It’s not perfection we need - just mirrors that make us feel that way.