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Great article in Times2 on Monday by Caitlin Moran, who writes wittily about how, at a recent funeral she was horrified by the amount of eminent 40-plus women who had clearly had cosmetic surgery. Far from looking good, she explained, what they really looked like was ‘scared’. So much for confidence building.
Here at the Women’s Room we are ambivalent about cosmetic surgery, if it makes you feel good and you have a few thousand to spare then we guess, why not? But if you spend more than a nano second thinking about it, it does seem a bit bonkers to us.
Major surgery, dodgy (not to mention expensive) doctors and the chance that one eyebrow will be higher (permanently) than the other seems to us like a lot of hassle for a problem that is possibly not even there. As Caitlin says, “There is no solution to ageing …because it’s not a problem”.
And we applaud the sentiment, why look on ageing as a problem to be solved? After all cosmetic surgery is a short term stop gap, you have to go back for more eventually, when you risk the gone-too-far skin stretch that ruins the whole point. Recent pictures of a frankly scary looking Madonna illustrate the issue here.
Even the less invasive Botox and filler route results in an emotionless forehead and stationary eyes, and with teenage kids to control we need the facial flexibility to look cross, very cross or down-right furious. How do you do that with stationary eyebrows? Give technology another couple of years and we think that slicing and dicing under a general aesthetic is going to seem pretty crude behaviour.
Besides which, as Ms Moran eloquently points out, we’re all looking much better than we ever did previously anyway, what with great hair cuts, improved skincare and a general nod to grooming absent from our younger period. A quick glance through family snaps indicate that our twenties were hardly our most photogenic moment anyway.
We’re all for a wrinkle cream that works or a multi vitamin that will make our eyes brighter, but we’re going to pass on the invasive procedures for the time being.
What about you?
Read Caitlin’s full article on The Problem with Ageing