How you never look right your entire life
And how 'wealthy ageing' is just another way to make you feel bad about your neck
I was overweight as a child.
I had something that I would now define as ‘misery weight.’ This shoving my feelings into my face, coincided with the mid-eighties when processed foods were being advertised everywhere. The sugary cereals, sweets, drinks - the things we now define as ‘ultra processed foods’ were bulging off the shelves. My parents weren’t ass holes, but I did eat quite a few of these things.
My Mum lived in Paris for a while and I had some pocket money, and I wanted to buy something, and whilst most dorky kids like myself would have bought green slime in a plastic jar, or a Rubik’s cube or a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book, I instead bought French Vogue. It was the equivalent of 4 pounds, and it was very heavy. A beautiful, sad looking girl (perhaps a similar age to me) was on the cover and her eyes took up three quarters of the page. I sat in my mum’s apartment, the canary whistling away in its cage in the background, and I leafed through this tome, this ode to feminine beauty and absorbed all the messages within.
You are too fat
Your skin is too greasy
Your clothes are cheap and nasty
BUT hold up!
There is a world that you can have access to if you buy these brands. You can never look as lovely as these women but perhaps it’ll help you be less of the round, wobbly woman-child and become more gorgeous and mysterious instead.
This was when I started to feel like I was wrong. The wrong shape. The wrong body. The wrong face.
I was ten.
My eldest daughter is almost ten now. And the pressures that my daughter faces in terms of beauty and success are more intense (Tik Tok makes a 1982 edition of French Vogue look like an old black and white movie). The thing is the future for tweens is bleak if we don’t snap out of our collective sense of awe around very narrow beauty standards. They need to look at us and see that we aren’t frantically trying to be someone else. Someone who is young, smooth and perfect and not ageing.
The new wealthy ageing trend ensures women continue to feel that they are not enough. Just when women are starting to learn about who they are, value themselves more, then suddenly a new pressure emerges- the pressure to look younger, fresher and like they aren’t a day over twenty five. It means that when we’re on our deathbeds we’re still thinking about whether our eyes look lifted enough, or whether we need to have a couple of tweakments before they zip us into a snug and cosy body bag.
It’s exhausting.
Instead of finally being able to say ‘FUCK FRENCH VOGUE/TIK TOK/ THE PATRIACHY,’ we’re instead shuffling into clinics and putting an 800 pound tweakment onto a credit card. Or buying some £80 body lotion that Gwyneth has yakked on about on her feed, forgetting that the body she has isn’t because of some numpty lotion and is down to a personally curated diet, personal trainer and access to the very latest tools. And no I don’t feel great that Martha Stewart is on the cover of ‘Sports Illustrated’ because she’s incredibly wealthy and it isn’t a look I can achieve at home with my bulging schedule of bringing up kids, working, and trying to stop myself from losing my mind.
I’m reaching a phase where I need to create boundaries because society is still preaching to me that I’m not right despite the fact that I seriously believe I am. I am also aware that there is hierarchy with only the truly youthful at the top, having access to the things that most of us can only dream about. My Instagram is swimming with adverts that are telling me that ageing is just in my mind but if I can see it on my face then here’s what to do instead. You are okay but not completely okay.
I was okay when I was 10. My daughter was right from the moment she was born and placed on my chest. We were both perfect.
We existed for ourselves and nobody else.