Mia Freedman: "Dear Hollywood, what do women my age look like?"

Yesterday I watched the Golden Globes. I love awards shows. Red carpets. Frocks. Celebrities. Hair. Jewels. Strategic posing. Fluff. Love it all.

I don’t care about the men even a little bit. Pah. Meh. This is an event for the ladies. And I love to look at them. For quite some time now I’ve been looking, searching really, for my future face.

I know, I know — a red carpet is a stupid place to look for your future face. Or even your current one.

But celebrities have always been avatars for the rest of us. They’re the shinier, glossier, famous versions of us. What we might look like on our best day if we had some industrial strength spanx and a team of professionals whose job it was to make us look flawless.

Whether they mean to, whether they want to… celebrities calibrate modern standards of beauty and desirability for us all.

So I search. I search on red carpets for faces of women who aren’t 22 or 25 or even 30. I’ve left those ages far behind and frankly, PHEW. They were not terribly happy ages for me. Not my peak. I found my 20s to be the most confusing decade of my life so far as I tried to work out who the hell I was. I’m hella happy in my 40s.

I just want to see other women my age looking, you know, my age — not 32, which is the age everyone in Hollywood somehow looks, whether they’re 22 or 54. Botox and fillers make young women look older but they have them anyway, for reasons I can’t hope to understand but with which I always try to empathise. A world in which your worth is indexed so brutally against your face and your weight must be impossibly difficult.

And when I look at the taut, puffy faces of the women on the carpet and their tiny, tiny bodies, I see fear behind their eyes and it’s reflected and refracted in mine. Because is that what I will have to do? To stay relevant? To be seen to be attractive or even just acceptable as a woman?

And then… and then… Tracee Ellis Ross.

Bam! She's 44 years old, a newly minted Golden Globe winner for best actress in a TV comedy, she isn't married, she hasn't got kids (she mentioned this in her speech) and she is what I've been looking for.

Tracee Ellis Ross doesn't look 22 or 32. She looks her age. My age. She is extraordinarily beautiful, yes of course (daughter of Diana Ross = good genes) but she's a grown-up woman who looks like one and acts like one in her hit show Blackish (which I've just started watching and adore).

Kristen Wiig also looked like a woman in her 40s.  She's 43 actually.

As did all the women of colour who brought not just racial diversity but also the booty. Women of colour always seem to me to look so much more comfortable in their skin. Like Kerry Washington, 39 and Viola Davis, 51.

Then of course there's Meryl. She's 67.

Next level. She is 360 degrees of incredible. Annette Benning caught my eye too. She's 58.

To these women, I say thank you. Because, as Viola Davis said last night when she introduced Meryl Streep, “You make me feel what I have in me...my body, my face, my age...is enough.”

Check out all of the Golden Globes red carpet fashions (and faces) in the gallery below.