Next month, Going Gray, a book about one woman’s decision to give up hair dye,
will be published in America. Not such a big deal, you might think, but
then, this is 2007, when only very old ladies in retirement homes have white
hair, not fortysomethings who used to work for Spy magazine. So, what
prompted the author, Anne Kreamer, to ditch the brunette and let nature take
its course? A holiday snap, in which she was sandwiched between her daughter
and an older friend. “I saw myself for what I truly was,” she writes, “a
49-year-old mother with a much too darkly shellacked helmet of hair. In one
second, all my years of careful artifice, attempting to preserve what I
thought of as a youthful look, were ripped away.”
So begins a book that addresses the ageing lie – the idea that we can all stay
youthful for ever with the right diet and hairdresser. It comes hot on the
heels of Nora Ephron’s hilarious book I Feel Bad About My Neck, a collection
of essays, some on the subject of getting older and not much enjoying it.
What the two books have in common, besides being written by Americans on the
wrong side of 40 (Ephron is 66), is a willingness to explore our weird
relationship with ageing. Or, to be more precise, the new received wisdom
that we don’t have to age any more, just as long as we put in the work.
Over there, they are calling this the anti–anti-ageing backlash. At last,
women who are in the middle of these invisible years are standing up and
saying: “Come on, just because we have banned the term ‘middle-aged’, it
doesn’t mean we aren’t exactly that.” And, more important: “How good do we
actually look in our sleeveless tops and Converse sneakers?” This is not
another debate about the rights and wrongs of the beauty industry. This is
not about the moral issues, or even the money (though Kreamer calculated
that she could have saved £32,000 on hair dye). All of that is just detail
and a distraction from the central question: why are women so desperately in
denial? Who are we kidding?
We’re being delusional
I am thinking about the forever-forty look (to borrow the fashion guru Mary
Portas’s expression). You know – skinny, worked-out body, longish, dyed
hair, tight designer jeans, whitened teeth – the look that says: “See how
lean I am? See, my style is not remotely dowdy. Aren’t you impressed? Guess
my age. I bet you think I’m in my early thirties.” It is just about okay,
until you are in a roomful of it, and then you realise that the look screams
“fortysomething in denial” – and that most of the women would look a lot
better if they cut their hair, laid off the bleach and put on half a stone.
The point is, we may not look like our mothers – we may have cast aside the
pearls and girdles and setting lotion – but we sure as hell don’t look like
our daughters. As Nigella Lawson, 47, says: “Our mothers probably thought
they looked young. We pretend ours is the real perspective, but to a
20-year-old, a 40-year-old looks old. It is very easy to be delusional.”
That is what’s happening here. Our eyes and brains have adjusted to suit our
agenda. You can wear shorts in your fifties and impress your peer group no
end. But that doesn’t mean you don’t look 50; it just means you look 50 in a
new way. We make the mistake of believing that if fortysomething for our
mothers was puffy pink arms and hot-rollered hair, then we must, by definition,
look younger with our hipster jeans and floppy fringes. Their hair was
starchy and... ageing; ours is vegetable-washed and shiny. They wore
stockings in summer; we have glossy, waxed legs. We have toned upper arms;
they had zero definition. But this is Iggy Pop territory. The man looks
extraordinary for 60, no question, but that doesn’t mean he necessarily
looks much younger than his years. The whole concept of middle youth is only
convincing if you are in the middle of it and blundering around in your
specially provided blinkers.
What does ‘good for your age’ mean?
If this were just about adults looking a little try-hard to younger
generations, it wouldn’t be so bad. But there is a more insidious side to
the middle-youth lie. It has created an uneven playing field for women. We
no longer know what “good for your age” means, or even what constitutes
“letting yourself go” (things are moving pretty fast: it could be not
getting your eyebrows waxed twice a week soon). Louise Chunn, the editor of
Good Housekeeping, began dyeing her hair again as her 50th birthday
approached, having been grey for most of her forties. “Making an effort is
mentally good for you,” she says. “But the emphasis has shifted to the point
where I fear I am going to turn around one day soon and women of my age will
all look much younger, because they will all have had stuff done.” This is,
as she says, rather different from choosing to have stuff done for its own
sake. “Even if I don’t want to go down that route, I don’t like the idea of
looking older than my contemporaries. And I don’t like the idea of being
ignored.”
Maybe this is what makes ageing such a different prospect for women who are in
their forties and beyond. If everyone else is determinedly nipping and
tucking, then the rest of us are going to look not just every inch our age,
but relatively older. There is, too, a sense that it somehow divides women.
For every woman who admits to the extent of her antiageing endeavours, there
are a thousand who admit to nothing – getting someone to own up to
Botox is like getting them to confess that they don’t recycle.
The biggest lie of the forever-forty myth is that we now have the wherewithal
to stay in what Ephron calls the “just before the bad things start to
happen” zone. This is the crux of the forever-forty conspiracy. Forty is a
cinch. Forty-one is fine, as is 42. But I can confirm that there is a big
difference between 40 and 44. Stuff happens, and the damage-limitation gets
harder. All of a sudden, you need to go to the hairdresser all the time.
Your arms look tired. Very high heels make the veins in your feet bulge.
Forget the dash of mascara – you need make-up, and plenty of it. You
need sleep. You can get a hangover from two glasses of wine. It is much
harder to buy clothes that look great and much easier to find ones that make
you look unhinged. When you are 40, you can wear anything; give it a couple
of years, and clothes you would never have considered high risk are suddenly
out of bounds: long skirts, leather, denim anything (besides jeans),
chiffon, the felt floppy hat you used to look hot in – all terrible.
Ballet pumps make you look like Baby Jane.
There are rigid don’t-go-there rules, and they have nothing to do with keeping
your figure, conditioning your hair or drinking enough water. “I don’t think
we have much choice in how we age,” says Lawson. “So to let people think
that it is up to them, and that if they try hard enough, they will overcome
it, is clearly unfair.”
Narcissists? Only because we’re worth it
Still, that is exactly what an entire industry is dedicated to doing, endorsed
by everyone from celebrities and dentists to fashion designers and doctors.
You may remember, not long ago, Nancy Dell’Olio announcing that she had a
biological age of 26. “I have it checked regularly,” she said. “Inside, I’m
very young.” It was a ludicrous statement by a woman who is estimated to be
47. Then again, is Dell’Olio’s fanciful grasp of ageing so different from
that of the average fortysomething signing up for IVF? Let’s consider the
facts: the success rate of IVF among women under 35 is 28.2%, falling to
10.6% for those aged between 40 and 42. Yet that is not what women are
choosing to hear. I have girlfriends older than that who are still delaying
their appointment with the fertility doctor, because the message out there
is: “Don’t let your birth date cramp your style. It simply doesn’t mean what
it used to.” It is all part of the same delusion.
Of course, the forever-forty con, like the IVF con, relies on the fact that so
much has changed in such a short space of time, and women have access to
treatments and medical procedures that were unheard of even 15 years ago.
You are not your mother: she didn’t have Pilates and Power Plate, sushi and
omega3 supplements, Boots antiageing serum and goodness knows what else –
a recent article in The New York Times estimated that women in Los Angeles
were spending between £1,000 and £1,700 a month on “basic maintenance” of
their looks.
“When my mother was dyeing her hair, there were two colours: blue or pink,”
says Ephron, who is not intending to go grey, for all her no-nonsense
approach to the subject of ageing. “I am a big believer in doing all the
teeny things, like having your gold fillings replaced with white ones. It
seems harmless if it makes you feel better. Are we in a worse place? Who
knows? But I certainly don’t feel angry about it, because I think we have a
choice.”
The way Lawson sees it, we are inventing a problem that doesn’t exist. “This
idea that everything is harder for us is just an extension of our
narcissism. We are actually very lucky to have things such as good hair dye.
It probably does make women neurotic and competitive, but then, women used
to be competitive about jam-making and cleaning their stoop.”
It’s all in the mind
Janet Street-Porter – who, at 60, happens to look more or less exactly
the same as she did at 40 – is equally convinced that too much time is
spent on worrying about something over which we have very little control.
She puts her youthful appearance down to genes (specifically, “thick skin”)
and attitude. “I like having dyed hair and big teeth,” she says. “Once you
go down the route of trying to look like a stereotypical babe, you’re
doomed. Looking youthful is in the mind, anyway. It’s a result of input
rather than cosmetics. Women have only got themselves to blame if they feel
bad about ageing. Liven up, for f***’s sake – there are far more
interesting things to talk about.”
Maybe the backlash has started here already.
