What does 35 look like, dammit?

Why didn’t anyone warn me how high maintenance aging would be? I first
started to notice this sobering development as I hit my late twenties.
Suddenly, cheap moisturiser and a bit of lip gloss and concealer just
didn’t cut it anymore. With every passing year, the number of products
required to make me look half decent has grown exponentially as have
the vanity hours required to keep me that way.

Last night alone I applied the following: clay cleanser to dry up
excess oil, AHA lotion to exfoliate T-zone, pigmentation cream to erase
splotches of mysterious brown facial pigment, firming eye/lip cream,
anti-puffy eye cream, neck cream, handcream, footcream and lip balm.
And that’s just my pm routine.

The irony of having to simultaneously battle wrinkles and pimples is not lost on me. It is unfair and unfun. When Britney sang “not a girl, not yet a woman” was she actually referring to my skin? Adding insult to indignity, the cheap tube of Clearsil that did the job in my teens doesn’t cut it either. Grown-up pimples (and wrinkles) apparently require a cabinet of expensive emulsions and a bunch of specialised dermatologist and beautician appointments. The sound you hear is of a hundred cash registers ka-chinging with glee as millions of pampered western women like me throw money into the scary abyss of “getting older”.

Having spent my teens and twenties aspiring to supermodels and celebrities who were also in their teens and early twenties, I’m now marching towards 35 with a very confusing landscape on the Hollywood horizon. Who are our aesthetic inspirations for getting older when no rich or famous woman looks remotely like her age? There are no 35 year old women in Hollywood. Everyone’s face gets frozen at 30 via botox and a myriad of surgical procedures including cheek implants, brow lifts, dermabrasion, wrinkle fillers and the hot new kid on the surgery block: thread facelifts, where metal strings are literally threaded through your skin to pull it up into your hair. Good times.

As Hollywood plastic surgeon Dr xx Colen recently told W magazine “A patient will point to a model in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, and say, ‘Dr Colen, I just want my breasts to look perfectly natural.’ And I tell her that, for a 45-year-old woman who has breast-fed two kids, she already looks perfectly natural. What she wants is to look perfectly unnatural. Beauty standards are changing. We don’t think natural is normal anymore.”

Terrific. Is our obsession with youth actually creating a population of middle-aged women with 25 year-old boobs and 30 year-old faces? Another plastic surgeon sees no problem with this. “If we can make a 50 year old look 35 with an endoscopic browlift, what’s wrong with a 35 year old wanting to look 24? Everybody wants to look younger and healthier.”

Sure we do but at what price? Would you risk cancer to erase a few years from your face? The answer is very possibly yes if you live in Hollywood. That’s the Faustian bargain into which dozens of A-list celebritities are entering as they elect to inject human growth hormones.  According to a recent report in the New York Post: “A host of Hollywood’s top names are destroying their health by taking the dangerous human growth hormone (HGH) to tone their bodies and smooth their skin – even though the drug, abused by bodybuilders for years, causes such severe side effects as diabetes and cancerous tumors.  PAGE SIX has obtained a secret list of celebrities who are hooked on this synthetic fountain of youth, and it reads like a who’s who of Tinseltown movers and shakers, including many younger boldfacers paranoid about wrinkles and sagging physiques.”

Now is a good time to say a quiet word of thanks that your bank balance doesn’t depend on you continuing to look young and hot; the curse of celebrity.
Last night I spent a rollicking couple of hours at awfulplasticsurgery.com. (if you’re really up for some fun you can heighten the experience, as I did, by browsing the site on your laptop while sitting on the couch in front of Extreme Make-Over and Nip/Tuck)
There I found endless photos of celebrities who may or may not be using HGH but who certainly haven’t left the aging process to nature. From the obvious (Lara Flynn Boyle,  Meg Ryan, Kylie) to the surprising (Jennifer Anniston, Cindy Crawford, Gwen Stefani), I came away simultaneously deflated and elated. Admittedly, it’s a relief to see photographic evidence that all that celeb“Ooooh I’m-scared-of-needles-and-I-could-never-have-plastic-surgery” crap is exactly that. Clearly, it comes from the same celebrity instruction manual that says “always tell interviewers that you can eat lots of cheeseburgers and you just have a really fast metabolism while making sure your small circular lipo scars are hidden and your diet pills don’t fall out of your prada clutch”. Oh look: a flying pig.

And then there’s Our Nicole. “Whenever Nicole Kidman appears at an awards ceremony, my email inbox is filled with the question: ‘what has she done to her face’” says Tara, the webmaster behind Awfulplasticsurgery.com. “Rhinoplasty, brow lift, cheek implants, lip collagen and lots of botox. She always seems to have trouble making facial expressions and resorts to these weird gestures using her head. People don’t find Nicole unattractive, rather they are simply baffled by how different she looks now compared to when she started. Aging is allowable but looking like a different person is odd.”

So who are the beauty role models for those of us who are more likely to listen to ABC radio than Triple J? The clichéd answers – Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jessica Lange  – well, best we not try to kid ourselves that they just have good genes.
Tracey Grimshaw, Gretel Killeen, Sandra Sully are all in their forties and are redefining our expectations of how good that age can look.

The Hollywood aging dance goes like this: in interviews, nonchalantly drop how scared you are of knifes and needles and how you couldn’t possibly contemplate surgery yourself, then add with careful condescension that you wouldn’t judge anyone who did if it made them feel better about themselves.

Then lie to the interviewer about your age and head from the interview to your plastic surgeon for a discreet lunchtime procedure. Because it’s all about maintenance darling – that’s the best way to avoid being exposed in before/after magazine pictorials. Remember: evolution via lots of little procedures is preferable to one big face lift. And who can blame them? We’re terribly tough on other women, times a million if they’re famous. We love rolling our eyes at pictures of Melanie Griffith with those rubber lips and wonky features that scream surgery but if she dares leave the house without make-up and we stare and point fingers and cameras accusingly.
Oh yes we do. Over the past few years, like many women, my extreme vanity has wrestled with the rest of my brain on the subject of botox. Many colleagues have made botulism their friend and I have been supportive and unjudgemental. I know full well that it’s only a matter of time before my vanity trumps my reservations. But for now, I just can’t get past the Stepford Wives factor; all those women who look perfectly bland whether they’re ordering a coffee or having an orgasm. Besides, as a mother, I need my cross-face. I’m rather fond of it, along with my other six facial dwarves: scowly, grumpy, weepy, happy, drowsy and crabby. Oh and zitty.