You're Meant to Lose It

The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #74

They say Queen Elizabeth I likely died, in part, from lead poisoning acquired through years of applying Venetian ceruse, the white paint that she and other noblewomen smothered over their faces as a sign of beauty, wealth and high social class. We no longer desire to paint our faces in the exact same style, but it isn’t too far afield, more than four-hundred years later, from the toxic products women are slathering over their faces today, not to mention the concoctions we’re actually injecting into our faces.

All that is to say women do some wild things to stay beautiful, and apparently they have for a long time. Today, beauty is about striving for the unnatural. If you don’t regularly get botox injections to erase wrinkles and other signs of wear, you’re compared to the legions of women who do. The so-called beauty bar has shifted. It’s not enough to age well. You have to eradicate age altogether. Of course, you can’t, but if you let your wrinkles show, you’re unfortunately going to look older than your injected counterparts, at least for a time (interestingly, at some point injections begin to show people’s ages, even making young girls look older) because those other gals aren’t playing with a fair deck. When I was younger, for instance, I had nice, big plump lips; but if I were young today, amidst a craze of lip injections, they would seem merely average lips, because we’re losing the sense of what non-altered, plump lips look like. As with so much in our society, beauty has become an altered reality real people can’t keep up with.

Of course, eradicating age is a losing battle. I can tell you with one-hundred-percent assurance that none of us will win it. Instead, we’ll run ourselves ragged and bankrupt, trying to keep up with people who have more money and more fame, and most importantly, more youth. The type of beauty we’re striving for nowadays is an unnatural one not just because of the unnatural chemicals and toxins we’re using to get there, but because it’s a fight against nature itself: We’re not exactly trying to look well for where we are; we’re trying to hold onto a way we looked once upon a time.

The type of beauty we’re told to want today is a wrinkle free, gray-hair free, airbrushed oasis that only little girls and young women, who are literally in the process of blooming, possess. Youthful beauty belongs to the young. That’s it. There’s no way around it. Once upon a time, older women seemed to understand this. You bought your mom jeans. You colored your hair. You used cold cream and got your nails done. There was no such thing as a MILF, one of the more nauseating creations of our depraved society, and to the best of my experience, no mother actually sought to be desired in such a way. You moved into the matron phase of your life and became concerned with other things; then you moved into an older phase, and became concerned with even other things. You bloom, you radiate youthful beauty for a time, and then you begin to lose it, and other beauties—wisdom, experience, patience, self-assurance—come your way.

But it’s not only aging women struggling to keep up with an artificial beauty standard. Via social media, young girls, as young as grade-school age, are being marketed a host of anti-wrinkle serums and makeup products to improve upon what clearly, to the not depraved and the not greedy, needs no improvement. It’s worth noting that not too long ago being beautiful naturally was easy to do. Nowadays even girls in their twenties, who’ve been sold the lie that botox is “preventative,” are getting injections. While I can imagine getting the steep and ever-appearing lines on my current face injected, I cannot even fathom having done it when I was 22, fresh-faced and smooth as a nickel all over the place. This business is in reality a monster erected to make people rich, and boy does the industry rake it in. A quick search tells me that the “global cosmetic surgery market was valued at around $57.67 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach approximately $81.66 billion by 2032.” When they’re making that kind of cash, nobody wants you naturally beautiful or gracefully aging.

Just to refresh your memory, in the 1970’s, here’s who was considered a “hot babe”:

Farrah Fawcett

From what I can tell in this photo, Farrah Fawcett looks like maybe she’s wearing some eyeliner? Other than that, it’s just the maddeningly amazing hair that makes her stand out. Maybe this photo is wildly airbrushed, I’m not sure, but this is how she looks in nearly every photo from the era. You can actually see lines around her eyes. It was an exceptional beauty, no doubt, but it was also an attainable one. If you were pretty, you could hold your own. You didn’t also need $10k a year in cosmetic procedures on top of what God gave you.

In the 1980’s, here’s who was considered a bombshell:

Phoebe Cates

That’s right folks, natural, girl-next-door beauty Phoebe Cates was the pinup in the ‘80’s. And why not? She’s young, pretty, looks airbrushed without plastic surgery. She is abloom, and people recognized that as beautiful for its own sake.

In comparison, here’s your hot babe of today:

Kim Kardashian

Millions (billions?) of women are literally altering their faces through plastic surgery and injections to look like Kim Kardashian and her highly produced form of beauty. This face has been carved, painted, brushed and injected to look like it’s never lived a moment in its life. It takes a team to create this look. I, on the other hand, have a couple of makeup brushes, two screaming kids and about ten minutes left to put on my shoes and brush my hair before I need to get out the door and face the world.

We cannot go on like this.

As I’ve run the gamut from 1600 to 1970 and up to the present, it’s clear that our desire to feel beautiful, and to be perceived as beautiful, is not going anywhere. It’s deeply ingrained in our nature. Yet, the pendulum has swung so far in the bizarre direction that it leaves the rest of us wondering, What’s a girl to do?

While I’m not old enough just yet to be old, I’m most certainly waving farewell to the effortless, blooming youthful beauty I’ve enjoyed up to now. The years, as they say, are showing. They’re showing beside my eyes, on my forehead, in my hair...Trying to fight it all is like trying to plug holes in a sinking ship. I’m not advocating for anything, to be clear; I think if you want a nip and a tuck here and there, it’s not that big of a deal. I’m not saying I’ve never done anything like that and I’m not saying I never will, but today we are far beyond this. Today, there is literally a face people are getting made out of their original faces, and it’s Kim Kardashian’s. Beautiful has become a one-line item; it’s robotic, not real. (Encouragingly, if this 2024 article from The Post is accurate, many of us have seen the light.)

If botox and chemicals feel good to you, you should do them, but if they don’t, it’s important we find some ways to grow older and still be beautiful, but in a less, grasping-for-the-bloom-of-our-life type of way. The truth is, even someone like Elizabeth Taylor, arguably the greatest sex symbol of the modern age, “got old,” and the youthful beauty she’d been known for faded. Kim Kardashian, she’s going to get old, too, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put her back together again. Time will find her, and when it does, I hope a natural, fresh faced, clean faced, organic beauty takes her place on the throne. For our sakes, and for our daughters’ sakes.

A 25-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, filming “Suddenly Last Summer”.

Taylor toward the end of her life. She died at 79 years old.

To be honest, I don’t want to be twenty again; I would, however, love to look and feel the way I did when I was twenty while being exactly who I am right now. That’s the perfect combo—to have the wisdom of age and the beauty of youth—but maybe that’s precisely why the package doesn’t exist. So much can’t be understood when you feel like the world is your oyster. Maybe the shedding of our beauty superpower, the stepping off center stage, is precisely what allows us to learn who we are, what we’re meant to do, and to care oh-so-much-less about what others think.

Youthful beauty is like lightning, and man, is it beautiful, wild and sharp and full of brilliance. It’s here, flashes, and then it’s gone. It doesn’t last. You are meant to lose it. Older beauty is like the sun. It isn’t headline grabbing. It isn’t fierce. It isn’t awe inspiring. It hums behind eyes that have seen so much and is a still, small light through faces that have lived a long while. If we’ve taken care of ourselves, if we’ve lived well and joyfully, the brighter it shines.

We all want to be beautiful, no matter what age we are. My mother still gets her hair done and paints her nails and cares about how she looks, even if she can’t wear heels anymore and the years behind her are greater than the ones ahead. She takes care of herself, still puts on her gold earrings, necklaces and rings. She makes peace with beauty where she is. Her beauty remains, shapeshifted, alchemized into another shade of brilliance that takes into account the experiences of motherhood, widowhood, and life as a grandmother. Like Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, clinging to a youthful version of ourselves is clinging to something that’s passed and will never be again, and it makes us deranged.

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I think next week I’ll share some natural things I do, and products I use, to aid in taking care of myself and (hopefully) aging beautifully!

Thanks for being here with me, truly.

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