Age Of Reason

Posted: Monday 21 June 2010 05:02pm

Do you recognise this woman? Does she look familiar but can’t quite put your finger on it?

We live in a strangely ageless society. People don’t have to look “old” anymore. Women don’t “have” to cut their hair sensibly short, dress like a matron or become invisible the day they turn 40.

There’s no imperative for either men or women to embrace wrinkles as their BFF, resign themselves to middle age spread, have hair sprouting from unseemly places while losing it everywhere else, or watch body parts migrate south for the winter. If they don’t want to.

Baby Boomers are working longer than in previous generations and expect to have the same “relevance”, professionally and socially, as in their youth.

A woman, particularly, keen to maintain a youthful appearance is no longer derided as mutton dressed as lamb, unable to accept the ageing process.

Ageing gracefully has thus come to have a whole new meaning.

But there’s young and there’s youthfulness and they’re not necessarily the same thing. When you get the two confused, the results are not always pretty.

The photo above of former Bond (Man With a Golden Gun, 1974) bombshell Britt Ekland, taken recently at the Edinburgh Film Festival, is not remotely  flattering. There were other, less in-your-face shots taken at the event in the same week where she looks way better, as here at left …

While Britt doesn’t look anywhere near 67,  she doesn’t look quite right, either, and certainly not herself. It must certainly have been a difficult transition from one of the world’s most feted and famous beauties, linked with powerful and famous men like Warren Beatty, Peter Sellers and Rod Stewart, and then been supplanted in the fame game by innumerable other hotties over the past 30 years.

“Those bee-stung lips helped to make her one of the pin-ups of the Sixties and Seventies,” commented British newspaper The Daily Mail. “So Britt Ekland can be forgiven for trying to recapture the look of her heyday … but [has] rather overdone it and ended up with the dreaded ‘trout pout’.”

Britt has been frank over the years about resorting to plastic surgery and cosmedical treatments to maintain her looks.

“I think it’s wonderful,” she said two years ago. “But there should be an age limit. It should be absolutely forbidden for anyone under 40.

“It’s for older people – to lift the chin here and take a couple of crow’s feet out there -not for young people who want to be bigger and plumper or thinner.

“Of course, it’s fatal when actresses use Botox. I remember seeing Cold Mountain and it really looked to me like Nicole Kidman had been using it.

“Her face was neither sad nor glad – nor anything. She was just like a painted doll. I thought, ‘Why would she do that?’.”

Famous last words…

Maybe the limit should be based, not on age, but what you actually do to yourself.

Helen Mirren, just two and a bit years younger than Britt, is still white hot while still looking 60-something and her career is flourishing as never before. There’s no proof she’s had “help”, although she appears no older – indeed, sexier and more radiant – than she did 15 years ago.

It’s not often you’d regard one of Hugh Hefner’s ubiquitous girlfriends as an oracle but Holly Madison, a pert 30-year-old blonde who admits to a little touch-up but nothing major, recently hit the nail on the head.

“I don’t like when people inject a lot of stuff in their face because then their faces move all weird,” she told an interviewer. “I think when young girls are thinking about plastic surgery they need to go to a very wealthy house party in Beverly Hills. All they need to do is look at all the old people in the room [we’re probably talking anyone over 40, you understand, in La La Land] and be like, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t want to get my lips done. Maybe I don’t want to get Botox,’ because you see how it ages.

“When people look in the mirror they see their face holding still. They don’t see, like, when they get injections in their lips, they don’t see themselves from the side. They don’t see themselves talking, they don’t see that their lip looks like a shelf. They’re just staring at themselves and are like, ‘Oh, my lips don’t look big. I’m going to go get more.”

Yep, the girl’s got a point … and at what point do you draw the line and say to yourself, I’m not the person I used to be but I’m just as good, only older? I’ll take all the help I can get but I don’t have to be 20-something to be relevant?

by Jenni Gilbert

Comments (1) Print Send to friend Share or bookmark this page