Kimberly Steele

I looked really, really young until I hit menopause at 48. I'm half-Japanese and half-European with a bit of Mediterranean in there. Two primary traits that kept me looking young: 1. Extremely oily skin — like vat of Crisco oily — from age 12 until menopause. 2. Huge, uncontrollable, coarse, mutant hair that is still giant to this day, though I’ve lost approximately one third of it.

There's a funny meme about Asian women who look 18 until they hit menopause and suddenly turn into grannies. I embodied that meme despite looking more white than Asian. There was a definite moment where I became insecure about it. I started wearing false eyelashes for a brief period of about six months after menopause fully manifested itself. I looked OK in them but I got tired of installing and pulling them off my eyelids at night. Plenty of women get what is known as eyelash extensions and I am aware of why they do it: The eyes are the first to show age. It is where the skin is the thinnest and saggiest. Waking up to puffy eyes that aren’t distinguishable as essentially “male” or “female” is rough. Getting older as a woman is de-feminizing, and not just because we lose our periods. The waist thickens and the breasts shrink, giving everything a more uniform, gender-neutral old person vibe. My regimen of 25 push ups per day is the only reason I still have somewhat defined shoulders. The nose and ears get larger, which is ugly on a man and absolutely hideous on a woman. I have always had giant hair to hide my giant ears, but there is no hiding the ever-larger nose. In the end, left to age naturally, we all end up looking like wizened old Hobbits at best.

This was in 2012 when I was 38. I had pinkeye and I could not wear eye makeup that week.

That said, people who are able to sort of turn back the clock with plastic surgery and fillers do not look good from my point of view. I will admit there is no small amount of schadenfreude in celebrities ruining their looks because they tried to escape the ravages of Father Time. I’m not in the financial strata that can afford to have procedures so that was and is off the table. I was a candidate: I have never liked my face & body on camera to begin with. I have a severely deviated septum, a crooked nose, a large, misshapen lower jaw despite having it reduced when I was a teenager, general facial asymmetry, and of course I never felt thin enough despite being of average weight. Beauty standards for Gen X were always fairly brutal. Look at our ideal women: Whitney Houston, Kim Basinger, Heather Thomas, Heather Locklear. All of them were thin as rails. To this day, I hate seeing myself on film and I cannot manage to watch myself for any more than a few minutes at a time. I was always dysmorphic and old habits die hard. It has been easier just to give up on being in front of a camera. Maybe I will be able to detach from my dysmorphia entirely and create video after video, but I doubt it.

In an odd turn of fate, I’m actually glad I wasn't born with a better jaw or without fat, cellulite-ridden knees: it taught me that those things are not the end of the world and they do not make the woman. For despite my copious flaws, I had a turn as the hot girl. At 28, I looked 21. At age 42, I looked 28. The women reading this are jealous and I suppose there are some reasons why they should be. Pretty privilege is real. I got out of tickets. I got free stuff for being cute. Nevertheless, I kind of hated being cute and it often sucked: women hate the hot girl and men look at her like a piece of meat. Sometimes I resented being cat-called and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I felt my life was threatened because I was hot. At age 21, I seriously contemplated jumping out of a guy’s car because I sensed he was thinking about the logistics of driving me somewhere so he could sexually assault me. I had been set up with this “nice” guy by one of my teachers. I needed a car ride and we were both going to the same destination. That night was one of the worst of my life. Being cute often does not get you the attention of the man you want — instead you get a predator or a would-be predator.

Beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. Some people did a "meh" when presented with my brand of beauty. Others were reduced to pitiful, drooling slaves who would have given a kidney to be with me. As a younger woman, I arrogantly thought that my beauty could secure the life I wanted. Most pretty girls harbor a similar delusion at one point or another: we are taught from day one that being pretty is important because you can get something for it, and usually this is the Perfect Man.

I may have seen the writing on the wall, because around the age of 37 I came up with the quip “If you don’t let go of pretty by age 40, it will eat you alive.”

I was 46 in this picture (taken from a unpublished piano lesson video).

I was not wrong. My Gen X peers who don’t let go of pretty are having full internal meltdowns. There is a slippery slope women hit where they get a tweak or two and suddenly they are having their faces pulled off and reattached at the hairline and neck. Do it too many times and you end up looking like a low-rent, blowup doll version of your former cute self.

Even AI prefers wrinkles. I went down a peculiar internet rabbit hole of AI generated women. The AI-generated young women all had freckled, tanned skin, full lips with prominent upper teeth, and light eyes with streaky, curly highlighted hair. More fascinating were AI’s ideal “older” women, none of whom had the puffy, Madame Jigsaw look sported by celebrity plastic surgery addicts. Instead, the AI ideal of the 50 - 70 something has the odd combination of eye wrinkles, neck sagging, prominent naso-labial folds, super-long hair, and a bit too much sun.

The AI version of an ideal hot MILF.  Notice how the algorithm screwed up her right eye.