You can age with grace and keep your own face

Opinion

You know what I miss? Faces.

You know, regular faces. Different faces. Faces that can emote. Faces that look like they’ve laughed before. Imperfect faces. Visibly old faces. Asymmetrical faces.

Now, especially online, everyone has the same face. Every day, I’m bombarded by images of influencers and Hollywood actors with immobilized foreheads and improbable cheeks. Taut, catlike faces with pillowy lips that don’t look young, exactly, but a different esthetic all together. Like uncanny-valley versions of themselves.

This bombardment is happening because I am a 40-year-old woman on the internet. I’m not kidding: the moment my odometer turned over and my age began with a four, I started getting targeted advertising and Instagram Reels about not just anti-aging products, but full-on plastic surgery.

“Upper bleph” is a term I had no knowledge of before. Now? Ask me anything about this procedure to tighten the upper eyelids.

One Reel advised me to start saving for my facelift now because “it needs to happen earlier than you think.”

I thought I was doing OK by sometimes remembering to swipe some night cream on my neck, but no. Women are wearing violent-looking chin straps to bed. They are taping their mouths shut. All of this in the Sisyphean pursuit of youth that I can’t help but think is meant to keep us distracted and striving instead of living.

I read a headline the other day accompanying a first-person story by a woman who got a neck lift at 41. One of the early versions of the headline referred to it being her “only choice.”

I beg your very finest pardon?

Look, I am pro-choice in all ways. I understand why people do all these things. You can do whatever you want to your face. I also reserve the right to do whatever I want to my face, and you know I will absolutely write about it if I eventually succumb to societal pressure to get a neck lift, even though I do not have neck-lift money.

But I think it’s important to look beyond individual choice and think critically about the broader systems we participate in and why, as well as interrogate a culture that still thinks women have best-before dates. And crucially, who profits from all of this? If our culture had a more positive — hell, I’d even take neutral — attitude about the idea of women aging, I wonder if this would be a billion-dollar industry.

It’s especially important to think about this when all these “interventions” start to feel compulsory.

For me, navigating all of this has meant getting real clear on my own belief system. Do I actually have a problem with my face or has society told me I should have one? Do I really believe aging means “losing your beauty” or have I just been raised in a culture that treats youth and beauty as synonyms? Do I feel compelled to Botox away these forehead lines because I think they’re “ugly” or is it because the evidence of my mortality is now written plainly on my face and that’s scary? Do I fear “looking old” or have I just been taught that once you hit a certain age you become irrelevant and, well, enjoy life out on the ice floe.

A lot of this is the same as it ever was, but I think the pressures are greater now, thanks to social media. In 2019, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino coined the phrase “Instagram face” to describe the “single, cyborgian face” that was emerging all over the app, achieved via filters and editing or plastic surgery, with people asking surgeons to make them look like their filtered selves.

Two things are going on here: one, we spend a lot more time looking at our own faces, whether it’s in selfies or in FaceTimes and Zoom calls. Two, cosmetic interventions — especially minimally invasive, low-downtime ones — have become much more accessible and ubiquitous.

This homogeneity of face is depressing to me. Aging aside, it feels like we’re erasing the parts of ourselves that make us interesting, unique and chic. And what happens when people start bringing AI faces into their medi-spas and surgeons? It’s already happening with AI hair colours and cuts.

When is it OK to simply look your age? When can we wear those years and all we’ve been through with pride? How could that be anything other than beautiful? Who told us it wasn’t?

But sometimes the internet gives us an unexpected gift that helps shift your perspective. I recently came across a Substack post written by the late American poet and activist Andrea Gibson, who died this summer at age 49. It was written when they were still undergoing cancer treatment, and it was about a surprising reaction to seeing their own face through an old-age filter, an iteration of their face they would never see in a mirror.

“As soon as I made eye contact with elderly Andrea, I nearly hyperventilated with joy. I knew that by the world’s standards I had aged terribly, but all I could see was beauty.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca