Slave to the Beauty Grind
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: November 17, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am maintaining a veneer of calm, but the bathroom mirror is starting to show my age. And I’m beginning to wonder if I have a thick enough skin to grow old gracefully?

Apparently, on the cusp of 45, I am approaching middle age. Some would say I’m in the middle of middle age but I say their arithmetic is pessimistic . After all, I’m a glass half-full kind of person. (Usually it doesn’t even take that much.)

I keep hearing  forty is the new thirty, and sixty is the new fifty,  and I’m confused because I just want to feel new fullstop. New, as in no longer tired, new, as in carefree with shiny hair and bouncy step.

Gravity is cruel to women. We have nice bits that stick out, partly to get noticed, partly to counter- balance high heels. Sometime around 45, you give up stilettos because they hurt and they’re impractical, so gravity decides your stick-outs are impractical too and they give up the pretence of weightlessness and down they go.

Do men feel this way about ageing? Heaven knows, my oil painting doesn’t. Why would he? He knows I find his soft belly and lack of definition rather attractive. (Actually, I feel that way about anyone less defined than me.) Moreover, I think he’s getting more distinguished with advancing years:  he’s greying around the temples and doesn’t have to do anything about it. He needs no more maintenance than ten minutes in the barber’s chair once a month. Perhaps it’s his absence of conceit that shows up the obsessiveness of mine.

For the first time, I have begun waxing my face instead of my body, and it hurts and it’s scary. My beautician blinds me with that lamp that is brighter than a thousand suns. She pulls it down so low even the capillaries behind my eyelids  try to shrink and look away. My beautician is a Nigella Lawson-styled Italian mamma, all heaving bosom and peachy skin, but she has the ability to tear hair out of me at the speed of sound. (I know this because there is a split second between when she finishes  and when I let out a shriek of shock and pain.)

Don’t expect sympathy from a beautician. She knows natural beauty is an oxymoron, and no one wants to look like one of those. She also knows beauty is bloody hard work, (‘the longer you leave it the worse it gets’). I arrive all sheepish with my inane apology : ‘I know I should have come sooner….’ but she’s already tut-tutting over my overgrown eyebrows and –dare I say it? – the fluff on my upper lip. I like to call it fluff because it sounds cute, like the down on a baby bird or the fuzz on a dandelion seed. Except it’s not cute, it’s mortifying. And then she gets out her spatula and spreads a pad of hot wax so big it covers half my face. I whine something about ‘I’m not Santa Claus yet, am I?’ but my question goes unheard, smothered by the tearing sound that means the wax and I have separated. My palms are clammy, which reminds me why I’ve only ever had one Brazilian in my whole life. (I didn’t get enough horizontal Samba to make it worth a second.)

I’ve also started having facials. I rarely feel like a client in those places, usually I feel more like a patient – those young lab assistants in their white tunics invariably ask: ‘Will you be having the oxygen facial today?’ and I want to reply ‘Why? Do I look like I need to be resuscitated?’ I say yes anyway, because really I’ve come for a power nap in a dark room with nice smells, which is rudely interrupted by a sudden blast of freezing air. It’s squirted at my face from point-blank range from an air hose connected to an oxygen tank, also connected to the smooth hands of the wrinkle-free facialist. I can never tell the difference afterwards, except for the greasy wreckage of my hair and the shame of having to venture out in public with a shiny naked face.

I guess that’s why it’s called maintenance – the effort of preserving what you’ve got so you’re not white-anted by sag and staleness – pounding away at the weights to stop the formerly good bits of us heading south for the winter and retiring there. Where did the rosy cheeks of my thirties go? I get them at the gym, but then it’s called florid.  Grey hair needs an arsenal all of its own, but repeatedly spreads like a plume of pollution, always leading from your forehead for maximum exposure.

I just don’t get this ageing business, but I think it has something to do with fertility: when we are young, beauty is handed out for free so we can attract a mate and produce children who never let you sleep. After you’ve produced the world’s cutest offspring  and you’re no longer good breeding stock by virtue of age and weariness, then beauty wanes, and vanity takes over. The saggy neck cream companies start trying to flog you really expensive potions we all secretly know do nothing. They can smell our desperation.

The only good thing about maintenance is that everyone has to do it. It just depends how much of a slave you want to become to it. A bit like my husband and our lawn. He knows there is nothing quite like a freshly mowed, weed-free lawn with clipped edges. I’d quite like him to think that way about me. You can tell just by looking at someone if they need a good clip, or a grease and oil change. How many men do you see obsessively washing and polishing their car on the front verge of a weekend? Or bending over the engine with the bonnet up and their shorts at half mast. They know the only way to keep turning heads is with maintenance.

For some reason the need for maintenance seems more acute with women. Is it because we are the early bloomers? That we stayed peachy for so long that suddenly, somewhere past 39, it’s an awful shock to discover that while our fruit is still firm, the current crop is tending towards overblown, and may, in fact, be ready to drop.

Men don’t have to put up with this middle-aged demarcation because models like Anna Nicole Smith agreed to marry men who were 89, proving men get better with age. How come they get all the plaudits? We get good with age too.

I wonder why I care so much how society perceives older women – those who are keeping the fabric of multiple lives sewn together, mending fraying seams and making the stains of modern life disappear with hard work, brains and charm – why is this glorious slice of society so ignored? Fashion doesn’t want to waste its painfully short attention span on dressing middle aged women and they remain under-represented in art, photography, on stage, in cinema, on rich lists and in boardrooms. And what about bedrooms? – who knows more about how to have good sex than a woman who’s been enjoying it for 25 years?

So, if my exterior upkeep is insurance against ever being described as dowdy, then let’s do the sums here: Suppose I now spend ten-fold the time and money I spent on maintenance when I was 20, then by the time I’m 70, it’ll be all I do. (At least it’ll give me something to do.) And when I fall off the perch at the hairdressers one day, my children and grandchildren will be able to take comfort in the fact I spent every last cent of their inheritance staying a natural blonde until I was 90. And my epitaph will read: ‘she didn’t look a day over 80.’