I’ve said it many times before and will keep repeating myself; baby smooth skin is not a goal to aim for as you get older. We have been taught the painful way in which we as women look at (our) skin.
Beauty campaigns blatantly depict anti-aging with models way too young for older skin. Hollywood stars who have been wholly retouched have led us to believe that our skin has to look a certain way. And it’s not just your skin that changes as you get older; the whole body changes. That, too, is eagerly retouched by the industry to sell products to women who believe they must continue to live up to certain beauty ideals.
I have personally experienced the impossible aspiration myself by now. At 46, I start to see the traces of years working too hard and sleeping too little. I smoked too much and partied way too hard, and didn’t eat healthily enough. Was it worth it? Uhhh yeah duh… I’ve lived, and even better, I’m still alive with great memories and new adventures to come.
Nowadays I take good care of my skin every day. Extensive routines to honor my aging skin, cleanse, moisturize well, especially drink a lot of water, and laugh a lot. I remember somewhere in my early 30s, I got persuaded to botox the smile wrinkles around my eyes… I can only describe what that looked like; there are no pictures of it because all evidence is banned. My husband is a living witness to the strange situation that unfolded on my face whenever I tried to smile. I learned a lot from those 3 months that laughing was an impossible task. Never again.
peer pressure
noun
noun: peer pressure; noun: peer group pressure
influence from members of one’s peer group
When I was a young girl, my mother used to say: If everyone jumps off an apartment, will you jump too? My lanky answer was, of course, no. But in reality, as people, we want to be accepted by our fellow human beings, and peer pressure is an issue not only among young people. If you hear, see, read every day that you should “anti-age”, then you may start to think you shouldn’t age.
When I look Rosalie, I see a warrior, a powerhouse, a beautiful woman, a story, a stunner, and a sweetheart. I see nothing but that. When she came to the studio for a fashion shoot, this catsuit hung on the clothes rack. I had arranged it with the hope that she would try it on, but when Rosalie saw it, including the cap, she didn’t hesitate for a second to put it on. I love that so much because she’s who I want to be when I’m 67. Shaped by life and full of confidence and freedom.
Women like Rosalie are the examples I want to look at during my scrolls on social media or while leafing through a magazine. There is so much more truth in it, so much more self-esteem than in the baby-smooth skin of the retouched ladies who are supposedly “older.” Anyway, I think this is what aging means.
