Young Enough To Play Evil Games, But No One Can Escape The Abyss Of Ageing
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday August 18, 2007
I am dying. Though I only endure the mildest of symptoms now, my body is slowly decaying. Within 60 years, I will probably be dead. Another tragic victim of the ageing process.
I know it is wrong to be maudlin about a rotting body before the age of 30. I realise it is silly and slapworthy. But I also know I am not alone in feeling this way. When your skin has served you tirelessly for so many years, providing temperature regulation and serving as a barrier to infection, it comes as a nasty shock to see it gradually sliding down your face. It is sobering to see all those warnings about sun damage coming to age-spotted, broken-capillaried fruition. It is traumatic to realise that hooded eyes and crepey cleavage are inevitable.I have started playing an evil game, which others have admitted to playing too, which involves spotting the ageing signs on others my own vintage and trying to assess who will age well and who will age badly. Whose chin line is starting to go? Whose face is starting to look haggard because they are too thin? Yes, wrong, I know. But so much fun.Girls are not the only victims of this evil game. Boys the same age start to look a little shopworn, fleabitten, some with greying hair rubbed off like an old cat. Pretty boys seem to suffer the worst, looking like overgrown, ageing child stars. Even calling them boys starts to seem quaint.As a result of playing my evil game, I have developed a checklist of the seven signs of early ageing, which is even more scientifically advanced than the methods used by the Ponds Institute. Here are the signs to look for: 1. Faces thin out and necks grow more sinuous, like a final acrobatic loop before a death spiral.2. Rosiness moves from the cheeks to the nose.3. Grey hairs appear so regularly that you stop yanking them out because you will be left with bald patches.4. The who's-hot-who's-not hierarchy shifts. The skinny people get fat, the fat people get skinny. People with oily skin get their payback, with teenage acne scars disappearing about the same time their acne-free, dry-skinned friends start to get wrinkly.5. Flesh becomes looser and even the skinny people wobble when they run.6. Something goes wrong with the vision and people in their early 20s start to look like schoolchildren.7. Even some of the skinny guys start getting paunches, making them look like ET.With the physical changes come behavioural changes. Maybe you will recognise some of them. You grow diligent about sunscreen and sunglasses even though the damage has already been done. You give yourself cosmetic surgery consultations in the mirror, lifting the brow skin to see what it might look like with the subtlest brow lift, like the ones they televise on cable.You start to wonder whether you really would have something done. Nothing extreme, of course, not like those full body lifts where they ringbark you then pull up your bottom half like tights. Maybe just injections. Or laser resurfacing. You pay attention to skin care ads you once flipped past in magazines, even though you know they are a waste of money and don't work: the serums in heavy glass, the radiance boosters in long tubes with nozzles designed to resemble syringes, as if it does almost everything that Botox does without breaking the skin.Ageing is a guerilla war where feminist principles are tossed aside. It is all very well to say you are not attached to your appearance, but as your appearance turns to mush before your eyes, it becomes apparent who really means what they say. Even women who truly believe that everyone should love themselves as they are will probably still nab a stray chin hair as soon as they see one.The important thing is not to waste money, brain space and time fighting a battle that you will only lose. The consumer organisation Choice recently released a study that showed even the very expensive skins creams marketing themselves as "cosmeceuticals" do very little to reverse the ageing process. Annoying as it is, we must look within us and realise that there are only a couple of things that will make the ageing process all OK: surgery, therapy, scotch.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald