Jennifer Aniston's face: why it's symptomatic of our confused narrative around ageing

It's relentless for women, as much as it's depressing

I was mindlessly scrolling through my Instagram feed yesterday. It had been a tough week (working and kids at home for half term), and I was aching all over. I have been trying to stop vaping, and it has left me on edge (not that I was doing it often but it was turning into an every day thing rather than a once a week thing).

I find scrolling relaxing but it can also be very triggering. I came across some content which was of a young man talking about Jennifer Aniston’s face (it was on an aesthetic clinic account- I think). He had superimposed his face into the corner of the screen whilst some stills of Jen at different red carpet events ran in the background.

‘Here we can see,’ he said gesturing at the middle zone of her face, ‘That Aniston has a stretched effect and so it’s obvious that she’s had a significant amount of work done in this mid-zone,’ then he used his fingers to magnify her face so we were staring into her pores which were now a million times bigger and looked like man holes in a skin coloured road, ‘And here if we look more closely into the skin around her eyes, we can see evidence of Botox, the slightly raised eyebrow on the left and then around the mouth lines…’ he continued this diatribe, this blow by blow account on the surface of Jen’s face in a flat tone as if he were a serial killer describing how he had chopped up his female neighbour and dissolved her remains in an acid bath.

He also seemed to really enjoy breaking her down. Making her feel bad. It was the kind of thing that if I’d seen it about myself I would have cried.

Every moment of every day we see content that’s all about making women hate themselves. Either it’s through showcasing some unrealistic exercise or fasting regime (I keep getting these animations on social which show a woman rapidly shrinking as she does a series of undemanding yoga poses over a period of 6 weeks) or it’s about a celebrity female who is ageing and is struggling to maintain the impression that she isn’t ageing.

Nothing to see here! I’m not changing. I’m the same as I was in 1997. Please don’t zoom in like that on my neck. Just back off a tiny bit…like please?

The newspapers are full of this guff too- an older female in the public eye who looks ‘incredibly youthful’ (= work done) or is dressed in a way that is ‘surprisingly revealing’ (= inappropriate for her age ). Jennifer has always been subjected to lots of news coverage around her relationships, her hair, the fact she never had children…but what often garners the most coverage is her face. Her face is where the war on women is fought.

She is vain because she is trying to chase youth but let’s tear her down because she no longer looks youthful- the media keeps on at her like a snake eating its own tail.

The tone of the man on Instagram is jubilant when he says the words - ‘Here are the tell-tale signs of filler in the cheek area which has this bumpy texture which is of course very different to the way her cheek area looked in this photograph from 2017 where we see she has a couple of lines around her eyes and still looks relatively natural.’

I’m not a massive fan of Jennifer Aniston. I’ve never loved Friends in the way that some people do. I think I was possibly in Amsterdam and going through my hedonistic phase which meant I only watched CNN at 6 in the morning when I was coming home and wanted to fixate on something that was normal and had structure.

Nonetheless I hate this man and his incessant negging on Jen’s face. Doesn’t he realise that she can never get it right? This man has a hamster-like face, and I wonder how he would feel to watch someone dissecting his small, square jaw (like a French bulldog) and his tight, blonde curls (which make him resemble a weird man/baby hybrid). How would he feel?

I hasten to add that we never (or I haven’t) hear about older men and their faces in this level of detail. Have you ever read an article about Bill Gates and his ‘remarkably refreshed looking eyes’? What about Elon Musk who in actuality looks like Leonard Nimoy’s nephew and wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Star Trek? Boiled egg face men. Men with gigantic comb overs. Men who don’t get out of bed in the morning and worry about whether some dick wad is going to call them out about their skin texture looking a ‘uncannily smooth,’ today?

I want the man who is criticising Jennifer Aniston’s face to fuck off. I want to tell him that he should try and have a film career in Hollywood for thirty years, and then come back and criticise her slightly wonky filler. I want him to have more empathy for women who are caught in this struggle to look young without looking like they’ve had anything done. I want to dispassionately dissect all the decisions that led to him having a face like that. I want him to see if he’d do anything differently.

Don’t worry Jen, I whisper.

Whatever you choose people will judge. It’s not easy for any older woman these days. You’re either washed up or trying too hard. I wish I could tell you nobody cares and everybody wants to read about your latest project.

If you were a man maybe.