It was refreshing to hear Courteney Cox boldly admit that she regrets her past efforts to conceal the effects of ageing. The actor’s realisation that it was all fairly pointless might stop the rest of us down here on the ground from trying it.
I’m not quite sure what’s she’s tried, she’s been a bit cagey about it, admitting only to the sort of mistake that “dissolves and goes away”, but apparently the world has been talking about “her ever-changing appearance – bigger lips, wrinkle-free forehead, the works”. So I had a stare at some of her before and after pictures, but I couldn’t tell the difference. She looked fine to me. No calamitous sausage-lips or balloon bosoms; no stretched, stuck-in-a-wind-tunnel face. Whatever she has done must have been fairly modest, and she could presumably afford not to go to any quacks, because cosmetic surgery can be a dangerous game.
But most importantly Cox has decided to stop “trying to keep up with getting older … [and just] let it be”. This is a lesson for us all, because there’s nothing we can do about it, and the sooner we stop being repulsed by old age, the better.
It’s not easy, though. I’m pretty repulsed by my own old age – the extra whiskers, moles like saucers, turkey neck, swaths of wrinkles and general last-chicken-in-the-shop body, but I am trying to love and accept it all the same. And anyone, like Cox, who’s struggling at 49, 50, 52 (there’s a bit of confusion in the press as to how old she is), is going to find it much harder as life goes on. So good for her, for starting now.
Perhaps it is more difficult to cope with old age if you have been considered beautiful in your youth. You have more to lose. But those of us who thought ourselves fairly gruesome from an early age (whether it was true or not) may have got to grips with this problem earlier. I moan about my own elderly looks, but really I don’t give half as much of a stuff as I used to. Having been called coconut-bonce, pointy head and a praying mantis by various fellows, I realised decades ago that I was never going to win.
But whatever you do, however hard you try, however “beautiful” you are, the bar will always be raised when you think you’ve got there. For Cox and her sort, there will always be some bitchy/slimeball commentator searching for a minuscule flaw that they can sneer at. Particularly if you are a woman, and getting older. And even more so if you are in the public eye. I hear comparatively little moaning about ageing men’s beer-bellies, bald heads, comb-overs, and general flab, whiskers and wreckage.
So stuff it. Why slice oneself to pieces, stick potentially leaking jellies into your breast, suck out fat, slap on “rejuvenating” creams, inject, paint, shave, and scrape away at your skin, at first to look pleasing to God knows who, but most of all, to stop looking old? Why not, as Cox has suggested, “let it be”, because nobody really cares. No one passing in the street spots you and thinks “what a hideous looking old woman!” They couldn’t care less. They’re probably too worried about their own mouldering complexions.
Not that I’m condemning any interventions. If you are weighed down by gigantic bosoms, or have none to speak of, or satchels beneath your eyes, or your front teeth fall out, then why not improve things if you can, and if it makes you feel better. I can understand the pain of wanting to do something about it. Aged 15 I was desperate to have the end of my gigantic nose cut off. It wasn’t allowed.
Now I dye my hair, I have caps on my teeth, my ears are pierced, I remove facial hair, I try not to go out with egg on my T-shirt, but the good news, I find, is that as the years go by, accepting one’s looks seems to get easier – if like Cox, you can try not to be bothered. Because what did she get for looking great while dining on maggots in the Irish wilds with Bear Grylls?
“There’s life in your eyes,” said he. Was that meant to be a compliment? Is that what all the anti-ageing efforts were for? Is it worth it?
