What price ‘ageless’ beauty?

For some days now, we’ve been seeing newspaper photos and TV promo plugs about veteran actresses who’ve somehow retained their looks and have been proving that beauty can be “ageless.”

There they are, proof positive of that amazing phenomenon, maturing and even old women on the wrong side of 40 or 50, yet still looking as soft and young as a baby’s bottom—or so they think.

Illusion

The closer you look at their “ageless” faces, the more you realize that they’ve been made up, airbrushed and “Photoshopped” to within a millimeter of their achingly beautiful and glamorous existence! Everything about them has been “enhanced” to create and sustain the illusion of eternal youth—but at what price?

The smallest crease or wrinkle is gone, vanished, obliterated, but so are all tinges and twinges of character, experience and evidence of having lived any of those vanished years.

The women who stand before us are utterly young and glamorous, but they have been “Photoshopped” or star-glittered away into abstract and abstracted icons of idealized beauty who have to remain absolutely still and soulless to sustain that vaunted and self-deluding illusion.

That’s okay for a super-glamorous magazine spread that pays tribute to beauty for beauty’s sake, but these women are supposed to be fine, flesh-and-blood actresses whose art and craft is to vivify the great range of human emotions and experience.

Best advice

How can they do that convincingly if they’re so busy trying to resolutely refute the evidence of all of those years and emotions?

It’s a losing battle with niggardly benefits aside from self-delusion, so give up the fight and let’s not go there, please.

The best advice we can share with these “eternally” lovely ladies comes from another “ageless” beauty whom we befriended at the peak of her amazing allure. When we got to know her really well, she confessed that maintaining her exceptional looks actually took … a lot of work! But, at the time, she felt it was worth it, because she enjoyed being hailed as an icon, a paragon and a vision of pulchritudinous “perfection.”

Years later, however, we saw that she was making herself up much less glamorously than before.

Losing battle

Her explanation: “When you hit your 50s and 60s, covering up the signs of age, even after facelifts and such, is a losing battle. You’re fighting not just the wear and tear of the passing years and decades, but the law of gravity itself: What once was up (in all physical aspects and body parts) must come down!

“So, instead of trying to cover the problem up with more makeup and youthful clothes and hairstyles and designer this and that, don’t make up—make down! The years may show, but they’ll do so gracefully, graciously—and that’s beautiful, too, in its own way.”

Later, she even stopped coloring her hair dark-brown and gradually let the “silver” show. She could have artificially made her “crowning glory” remain dark, or turn auburn or blonde or flaming red as some mature women do, fooling nobody (least of all themselves), but she chose to fess up, relax and enjoy her sunset years.

Instructively, though, she continued to be hailed as an icon of beauty even in the afterglow of her luminous and, oh, so wise existence.

Truly ageless

We trust that today’s “perfectly” beauteous screen goddesses will learn from her ennobling and exalting example and focus more on their performances, which can be truly ageless in their brilliance and depth of feeling and insight, than on their Eternal and Ageless Beauty— which, eventually, never is.