Jennifer Horgan: We need to forget about the processed faces and age gracefully
We are becoming walking, talking portraits of what is naturally impossible.
A friend has decided to get Botox and fillers and I really wish they wouldn’t.
Not because I judge her but because I love her face — just the way it is.
I’ve seen it turn from being a child’s face with freckles, to a teenager’s face with spots, to a woman’s face, lean and elegant. I feel resentment towards this poison that threatens to make her look like everyone else.
I think Botox makes us unhappy — not just the people who do it, but also the people who must look at augmented versions of the faces they love.
The beauty industry is cashing in on our Faustian attempt to strike a bargain designed to hurt us. We must age. We must die. That’s the only deal we can trust.
Sure, we’re told Botox is safe but the psychological and emotional impact of full-on death denial is worth mentioning, especially heaped on top of our climate denial. Because our looks are a part of nature too, all part of the same system we’re either distorting or full-on destroying.
This denial is age-old.
If the final days of the Roman Empire gave us the gout-battling man in a toga, guzzling lead-poisoned wine, modern Ireland gives us the woman plumped up with fillers, driving a large SUV through the narrow streets of suburbia.
And the truly damning part is not the woman herself but how we all tell her she looks great.
Not because she does, but because we like to ignore the wisdom of the earth and the body when we don’t like what they’re telling us.
A woman that body-deep in denial starts to look attractive, comforting even. The world can’t be in trouble if we’re all still glorying in such excess, right?
Wrong. It was announced last week that Ireland is on course to reduce its greenhouse gases by only 29% in seven years — a far cry from our legally binding target of 51%. We need to urgently “grasp the nettle of climate action” according to EPA director general Laura Burke.
Who is up for telling Ms Burke that we don’t want to? We’d rather stay here, in the land of total denial, slowly morphing into the symmetrically-faced AI we’re designing, zooming through cities in our souped-up time bombs.
SUV sales are going up and up in Ireland, despite emissions 20% greater than your average car. We know the dangers, and just like the Romans before us, we are not changing our ways. If only we didn’t know. If only we could return to the '80s — to the glorious land of smoking, sunburn, public littering, and cars without seatbelts.
Denial sucks. Ignorance was so much better.
This attitude doesn’t mean we don’t care. I’m not judging it. If anything, I share it.
We can’t cope, and denial is the best defence because, probably, we care too much. We’re actually petrified. We have just grown so accustomed to carrying the heavy load of anxiety across our backs and strapped against our hearts, like a parachute we know won’t open, that we are paralysed by it.
Just as our faces are paralysed.
‘Aesthetics’ is worth an estimated €200m a year in Ireland.Women in their 20s are getting Botox now, like ageing is a disease, a malignancy to be avoided.
I prefer the stories of people like Diane von Furstenberg, the American fashion designer who brought us the wrap dress, who refuses to call herself 76 years ‘old’. She refers to herself as being 76 years ‘living’.
The day we celebrate a woman who genuinely looks 81 in a swimsuit on magazine will be the day we’re finally getting somewhere. Because I’m sorry, Martha Stewart, you are not that.
I look at my ageing face with compassion. I want to look at my friend’s face that way too.
And I will, in some sense, because I’m not judging her.
I’m just sad that I won’t be looking at her, not really. I wish I could see her face age as it is meant to age. I want to share that with her, our ageing together. The same way friends share a first period, a first kiss, first broken heart.
My face is far from perfect but it’s mine and it carries my story.
Look closely and you’ll see a chickenpox scar on my chin from when I was seven. My nose used to be better until I developed a weird lump in it when I was around 25.
My eyebrows are odd-looking because I over-plucked them when I was 15. I think of my lovely speech and drama teacher, Mary Curtin, who did her best to talk me down from the tweezer, every morning when I fill them in.
As I said, we are all going to age and die — but the beauty industry promises eternal, blissful youth.
We are becoming walking, talking portraits of what is naturally impossible.
Our money would be better spent on good, local, imperfect-looking food, a pair of good walking shoes, and time spent with friends. We are becoming a people of processed food and processed faces and the story is getting boring.
