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Clearly people want to discuss the hideous evils of plastic surgery and youth chasing procedures, and I will be writing about those subjects in the future. For now, I am going to pull a Pollyanna and focus on the positive, because even though it may only appeal to my old numbers of readers, it is one of my core philosophies and aims in life to build up the good by relentlessly focusing upon it.
They Live
The expansion in number of both famous and non-famous people who opt for ghastly, faux-youth extending procedures and treatments is not going to halt anytime soon. Goldie Hawn, who of all people should have known better, became Death Becomes Her. Lauren Sanchez's face looks like a pincushion, and chances are it acts like one too whenever she is behind a beauty "expert's" closed doors. Jocelyn Wildenstein looks like Frankenstein's monster, a patchwork of scar tissue, her expressions constrained and tight as she squints through a heavy, inflexible mask of rope and hardened bands that appear as if one or more will snap if she sneezes. More ghoulish than the botched, Saw doll Madame puppets are the plastic ice princesses. They look like slightly different alters of their own young selves. They might be clones. Kris Jenner, Martha Stewart, and Lindsay Lohan are not the ones we knew. At least the butchered versions of Goldie Hawn, Lauren Sanchez, and Wilden-franken-stein assuredly still walk among the living. Poor Lindsay Lohan appears to have been erased and replaced, her entire drug-addled history vanished down an eerie memory hole. She emerged into 2024's scenery eight inches taller, sans her trademark freckles, and beige blond like an AI butterfly from a cocoon of black mirrors.
Who knows what uncanny, Stepford transformations and soul swaps await the current set of Hollywood freaks who dress old hunks of moldy, petrified cheese in surface layers of bright, orange Velveeta?
Not all celebrities . . .
Let's forget those losers for a hot minute to look at some unusual, lucid examples of what sane aging looks like. I am not going to speak to the potentially problematical personalities or misdeeds of any of the following celebrities. That is not the point of this essay, though I will not prevent anyone from discussing it in the comments.
I would like to sing the praises of some famous people who have had little to no work done, that is all, in hopes of encouraging more people to tread the same unadulterated path.
Frances McDormand is a very good actress, and perhaps if any actress could have pulled off a perpetual LARP of an ingenue, it was her. She definitely had the acting chops. Thankfully, she has not chosen to go that route. McDormand was never a bombshell, and her roles have reflected this sober reality over the years: she is more gritty than pretty. Affable and funny, she has stayed relatable. Nevertheless, like many celebrities, she is a good looking person with excellent bone structure. She has thin lips. Instead of making her lips into small rubber tires, she looks refreshingly human.
Sigourney Weaver and Frances McDormand could be sisters by another mister, both in looks and in their avoidance of bombshell roles over the years. Like McDormand, Weaver could never pull off the cupcake princess schtick anyway, and perhaps that has been her secret weapon all along. She too has small lips. She has taken a hard pass when it comes to inflating her mouth to resemble the ass of a baboon in heat. Her hooded eyes have the loveliest of creases under them. They are a nice complement to her other stately wrinkles, hopefully the markers of a life well-lived.
Morgan Freeman is almost 90 and does not look a day over 78 LOL. He is as bald as a cue ball these days. My father, who died at 85, had little to no hair from age 35 onward. Men go bald. This is not a big deal. Seeing it is also not a big deal. Again, Freeman has excellent celebrity bone structure, and that bone structure has not betrayed him. He has sagging and white hair on his brows and chin as we would expect.
Viola Davis is a good, young looking 60, her face and body only hinting at the march of age. She does not, however, look 20 in any way, shape, or form, and thank heaven and her own good taste and foresight for that. Her forehead wrinkles like a crumpled paper sack when she scowls or cries. There are no fillers to stiffen it or to make her cheeks inflate like water balloons. In a sea of human flotation devices, she has opted not to look like a mannequin with a peanut allergy.
Emma Thompson got in hot water when she called modern day plastic youth chasing a "collective psychosis" and "a very strange thing to do". In a 2014 Hello Magazine interview, Thompson said,
"It's chronically unhealthy and there's this very serious side to all of that because we're going to end up with this sort of 'super-culture' that's going to suggest to young people, girls and boys, that this looks normal. And it's not normal."
We have arrived at the super-culture of which Thompson spoke. Rhinoplasty, Botox, fillers, and lip fillers are all the rage among Gen Z, the average member of which is in her early 20s. Yikes.
Thompson's ongoing condemnation of plastic procedures triggered RealSelf writer Suzy Katz, who describes herself as a recovering plastic surgery addict. Katz quickly pounced on Thompson's proclamations in her more recent interview, accusing Thompson of blaming women for the "intense scrutiny society puts on their looks".
The idea that "society", that vague, amorphous monolith that cannot be boiled down to any individual's choices, is the ultimate motivation for dicing up your own face like a Thanksgiving turkey, is ludicrous. It is a cop out and a ruse.
I am society. You are society. We are all society and therefore we share the responsibility of making society. Suzy Katz would like to diffuse and abdicate responsibility, but I will argue that she stood for nothing and fell for everything.
I can forgive her for this sin despite her not asking for my forgiveness. We all have been hoodwinked at some time or another, and plastic surgery/procedure people, with their mutilated faces and bodies, are forced to wear the permanent marks of having been made into somebody's bitch. Their plight is understandable and forgivable. What I cannot forgive is the arrogant doubling down on the claim that wearing youth like a minstrel's mask is defensible and good. I grow especially prickly when the victims of such grotesque procedures insist they are normal and healthy.
Ugly on the inside
The bone I have to pick with the transhumanist meat Lego/Potato Head project is that it trains each successive generation with increased intensity to focus its time, resources, and medical expertise on stuff that does not deserve to matter, especially once we have reached a certain age. It is one thing for a teenager to be obsessed with fashion, hair, and other manifestations of etheric maleness, but teenage dreams have no place in middle age. The austerity of middle age is not superior to the frivolity of youth; neither is better nor worse than the other. The key is recognizing that they are both very different to each other, and to each there is a season.
In my own case, a solid decade of daily discursive meditation and slightly less time spent in daily banishing rituals and divination have transformed middle age into the happiest, most fruitful, and tranquil era of my life. Perception deepens in middle age, or at least it has for me, and despite writing two essays per week for the last two years and producing an upcoming book called Sacred Homemaking: A Magical Approach to Tidying, I only ever put the tiniest amount of my perceptions into my scribblings.
How to be popular
As a former dysmorphic, middle age has been especially healing for its release of daily concern about my looks. I have finally gotten it through my own thick skull that others do not care what I look like (with proper exceptions for decency and hygiene, of course). No, others want to be SEEN, and not for their physical beauty or its flaws, but for the goodness and light they hold within.
Make a point of regularly seeing beyond hairstyles, clothing, acne outbreaks, and weight and you will be more popular than you ever dreamed you could become. Like you, others desperately want to be appreciated and thanked for their good works. It really is that simple.
I appreciate the guy who bagged my groceries quickly and neatly. He did far better than I could do in the same amount of time. I thank him. Nothing elaborate, just a quick "Thank you" and a smile that meets his eyes. When someone stayed stopped on the way into the intersection to allow my car into the line, I always wave because he or she did not have to stop for me. When my husband does the dishes, buys snacks, or makes dinner, I always thank him at least once. I do not do it out of obeisance or guilt, but because I genuinely appreciate not having to do those things for myself.
My focus is not on people's looks and in return, their focus is not on my looks. At age 52, I still field compliments addressing the way I look, though they are not nearly as frequent as they used to be. I was always a young looking person despite having avoided cosmetic procedures, and though I am a little overweight, I have always barely squeezed into the current ideal of thinness enough to pass. I am the perfect candidate for a brutalist makeover that would convince the world I am 25 again. No thanks.
I had my moment in the sun. I was extremely pretty and my body was spectacular at age 20. I also took antidepressants, smoked cigarettes, and barely ate when I was 20. I was gorgeous and dreadfully unhappy. In middle age, I am no longer drop dead gorgeous but I am happy. Having lived through both, they do sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive realms. I'll happily take the second one over the first.
Brigitte Bardot, then and now
The sexiest woman alive
Brigitte Bardot was arguably once the sexiest woman alive. She was hotter than I ever was at the same age, and chances are she was hotter than you at that age. Bo Derek, the supposed Perfect 10, was more like an 8.5 compared to Bardot at her peak. Bardot's fate was to be cast and re-cast as a bimbo with only a few serious roles. Like Marilyn Monroe, most audiences never fully accepted Bardot as anything but eye candy. Of course unlike Monroe, Bardot survived to the current day. Along the way, however, she lost her looks, and much to the chagrin of the System, this seems to have been deliberate. Bardot gained weight, got some jowls, and generally did not alter what age brought. She is now 91 and looks 91. Her hair is gray, her neck is craggy and sagging, and her decolletage is well-covered. She is perfect. She is how I imagine I will be at 91 if I do things right.
Bardot came out strong for animal activism in 1962 and later said, "I gave my youth and beauty to men. I gave my wisdom and experience to animals."
Bardot often felt hunted, especially as a young beauty, and had she gone down the well-traveled road of plastic renewals, she would have perpetuated more of the same. Instead, she flipped the script. She gave the proverbial bird to the drooling, pornified, sex-on-the-brain coomers and allowed Nature to mute her beauty, at least on the outside.
Sounds like a solid plan.
