My relationship with my face

Or how my perceptions of beauty have changed over time

In my hall I have a series of photographs. My Mum mounted them in a long, horizontal frame so the first is from when I was 18 months old, right up to around age 12.

‘You were pretty when you were little,’ my daughter said looking up at them and I tried to see them through her eyes.

I did look sweet, especially in the ones where I was like 8 or 9. Before I got overweight (overweight enough for the school to write home and say they were concerned). I have never felt like an attractive person.

I grew up with my best friend becoming a model, head hunted when we were both looking for the ideal 501 jeans in Camden market. I used to accompany her to the model agency now and then and hope that maybe someone would approach me. I was invisible to the model bookers. I think they imagined I was the cleaner. I have these legs which refuse to be long and willowy. They want to be substantial and strong. Nothing wrong with that but that isn’t what models need. They need long, lean, stretched out bodies instead.

These were the days of the big super models going out with rock stars, and I was working in McDonalds as a weekend job and dating the manager. We didn’t really get on but I hoped that if I went out with him he’d stop putting me on the grill which meant frying burgers, fat spitting on my wrists, sometimes getting those painful burns that run across your arm when I tried to flip a burger up and pop it into the bun. Sometimes when I was on the till I would be handed ecstasy tablets from men who were coming out of the pub next door. I never had the balls to take them but I gave them to a colleague called Penny instead. She used to sometimes take them at work and would stand next to the filet machine with a blank expression, big black eyes and her jaw waving from side to side. I’m not sure they cook burgers like that anymore but that was my life. School. A fairly unhealthy family life. Boyfriend at McDonalds. Weekends at McDonalds whilst my best friend went for model go-sees with Vivienne Westwood and John Galliano.

I had a big nose. I’ve always had a big nose. I hated it and I also hated my teeth and my mouth. I wore a scarf covering most of my face for an entire year of secondary school. The thing is when I look back at the photos I see an elegant girl, a swan-like neck, big blue/grey eyes and a cascade of blonde wavy hair. I should have aimed higher than the McDonalds guy (mainly because he was a dick and when things went wrong, he made me clean under the fry machine after each shift just so he could see me on my knees).

I provoked extreme reactions in the opposite sex. They either found me violently ugly or incredibly beautiful with no middle ground. I once had a guy start a fight with another guy because he thought the guy was being inappropriate and too forward with me. I had one guy tell me that I looked like a rugby playing man. I often had men chatting me up in the hope of getting to my friend. I had a guy 12 years my senior say I was the most beautiful woman he’d ever clapped eyes on. I ended up living with him for several years.

Anyway, I digress. When I reached my mid 40s I started noticing that my face was looking worried. Very worried. Worried when my kid was sleeping through the night. Worried when I was watching my favourite series. Worried when I was with a bunch of friends. Worried in work meetings and presentations. At the time Botox wasn’t as popular as it is now, and I went to a clinic, completely unprepared, not knowing what I wanted done. I wanted to look, not happy, but just…neutral.

The experience was not brilliant in that the practitioner perhaps spotted an opportunity and ended up selling me a whole heap of stuff I didn’t want. I came out with a face that was no longer worried. But also looked like a balloon. Like a pancake kind of effect. I had had a bit of filler too and when I smiled I noticed that I had puffed up cheeks.

‘I look like a fucking chipmunk,’ I told my friend, the one who was a model, still beautiful and still pretty much un-changed since our youth, definitely not looking worried like me.

‘You’ve always beat yourself up about the way you look and it’s silly. I mean do this if you want to but you don’t need it!’ she said.

‘Do I look weird?’ I said.

‘No I mean you just look a bit more awake. Okay a bit puffy. But that will calm down. Just remember you’ll never be happy with how you look. You’re the girl who won’t get into the sea without shuffling towards the edge with a towel wrapped around your body.’

We laughed. I tried not to feel the familiar envy I felt looking at her and her beautiful face. It didn’t mean her life was better than mine. Or maybe it did but she still had her own misfortunes and bullshit. She wasn’t married to a rock star.

Still weeks afterwards and people gave me compliments and said I looked ‘really well’. I no longer looked worried or got men shouting out of car windows- telling me to ‘CHEER UP LOVE IT MIGHT NEVER HAPPEN!’ (this kind of attention finishes when you reach your 40s anyway I find).

I have continued to have Botox every 9-12 months or so. I got some filler put in my lips. The first time I did this I booked it into my lunch break at work, and then was horrified to discover that my lips were getting bigger and bigger whilst I typed up a debrief about advertising for a big sanitary towel brand. I went to the toilet and resembled a demented Mick Jagger. A colleague came in and asked if I was okay and I just mumbled, holding a piece of tissue paper up to my mouth. I went home early and put ice on them and they went down eventually.

I’ve been more cautious about doing that kind of thing now.

I have written a lot in my books (how wanky that sounds but indulge me because I’ve had a rotten week) about Botox and feminism and how we beat ourselves up because we don't want to be so fixated on our appearance, or part of the lie that tells us that we can’t age and be beautiful at the same time. For me it was less about ageing, and more about not looking worried. I also found that I was more paranoid working in a corporate environment where everyone was younger.

I look at the photos of the young girl in the hall now and I can still recognise myself. I am not someone who has gone overboard. Maybe others disagree. I do try and refrain from trying more avant garde techniques or being tempted by things which haven’t been road-tested.

Do I feel beautiful? No.

Do I think I was beautiful back then? Yes possibly.

Was it the kind of beauty that gave me a lifestyle of luxury and hedonism and Hollywood? No.

It was the kind of beauty that we all possess when we’re young. It was naive. It was optimistic. It was about expecting good things and running from bad. It was about dumping the manager of Crystal Palace McDonald’s on a rainy, Saturday night as we sat in a Weatherspoon’s-style pub.

‘You seem pissed off,’ he said as he plonked a large pint of cider and blackcurrant in front of the table and lit a fag.

‘I’m heading home,’ I said rubbing a long burn on my arm with my finger, thinking about how I’d just done four solid hours of burger tossing despite having told him just how much I hated it, ‘Let’s go back to being work friends,’ I said, surprised that I’d expressed the thought that had been hanging in my head for many days now.

I walked out, turned left, the rain quickly sticking my blonde, wavy hair to my forehead. I got the bus down the steep hill and met my best friend the model. We put De La Soul on her record player, shaved our legs with her Dad’s razor and then smoked out her bedroom window.

We plotted how one day, one way or another, we’d rule the world.