A message aimed at women over 40 has gained momentum over the years: Embrace ageing. On the surface, I’m completely on board. Ageing is a privilege. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our birthdays, and we shouldn’t be made to feel that every wrinkle represents a personal failure.
But somewhere along the way, “embrace ageing” has started to sound like “You shouldn’t care what you look like anymore.”
I’m not buying that.
I don’t feel old. I know I’m getting older. I’m not denying my birth certificate. I’ve met the number. We have a working relationship. But the woman I experience myself as in my head doesn’t always match the woman I see in the mirror.
And I think that disconnect is the part we aren’t talking about enough.
The strange gap between the woman in your head and the woman in the mirror
I still have an enormous archive of myself in my head. I remember what I looked like at 20 and 30. All those versions of me still exist in my memory, and more importantly, they’re all still me. My internal sense of myself doesn’t suddenly get replaced on my birthday. There isn’t a little notification saying, Congratulations! Your identity has successfully been updated from 41 to 42. Please restart your personality.
I wake up the next morning, and I’m still me. I still have the same sense of humour, interests, and ambitions. But my face keeps moving. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, it changes.
And then one day you catch yourself in a photograph and think: Hang on. When did my face start looking like this old lady?
Not because you think you’re 25. You don’t. It’s because you still feel like yourself while the visual evidence of yourself has changed.
There is even a name for the first part of this disconnect: subjective age, or felt age. Research has found that people often feel younger than their chronological age as they move through adulthood. So when a woman says, “I don’t feel 42,” perhaps she’s not refusing to accept reality. She may simply be describing it.
And perhaps that’s where we should start when we talk about embracing ageing: not with what a woman is supposed to look like at a particular age, but with the fact that how old she feels and how old she looks aren’t necessarily the same thing.
We don’t actually see our own faces the way other people do
This is where the science gets particularly fascinating.
A study of 36 middle-aged women looked at whether people accurately perceive their own facial ageing. The researchers found a measurable gap between how women perceived their facial ageing and how their ageing appeared when photographs of their faces were assessed. In three areas-the cheeks, lower eye area and facial contour – the women perceived their ageing as less advanced. In some areas, the difference corresponded to as much as eight years on the study’s age-equivalence measure.
But the detail that really caught my attention was the angle.
The women’s facial sagging appeared more pronounced when their faces were viewed from the side than from the front. The researchers suggested that because we normally see ourselves from the front, we may simply be less familiar with the changes that become apparent from other angles.
Which makes perfect sense.
We don’t live in profile.
We see ourselves in the mirror from the front. We see our faces on our phones, mostly from the front. We become accustomed to that version of ourselves.
Then someone takes a photograph from the side, and suddenly you’re introduced to a woman you might never have seen before.
And she has jowls.
Not because the jowls weren’t there. Apparently they’ve been attending all along. It’s just that you’ve never really had to look at them.
And that, I think, is the fascinating part. The woman in the photograph isn’t a different version of you. She is you. She’s simply a version of you that you’re less accustomed to seeing.
Furthermore, the study found that more than 70% of the participants reported increased motivation to improve their aged appearance after seeing a side-angle photograph of themselves.
That’s not surprising considering seeing ourselves differently can change how we feel about what we see. And perhaps that’s an important part of the ageing conversation too: accepting that you’re ageing doesn’t mean you have to be indifferent to what you see.
And now we see ourselves constantly
Previous generations had mirrors and photographs, but they didn’t have constant visual access to themselves. Today, we carry cameras in our pockets and spend our days surrounded by images of our own faces.
We can spend an hour on a video call with our face sitting in the corner of the screen looking back at us. We have years of photographs stored on our phones. Friends can tag us before we’ve even had a chance to approve the lighting. We can take a photograph and immediately zoom in on something we were perfectly happy not knowing about five seconds earlier.
Is that a wrinkle, or has my face developed a tiny canyon?
Technology hasn’t necessarily created our discomfort with ageing, but it has given us vastly more opportunities to notice it. We can now see ourselves from angles previous generations rarely encountered, and we have a digital archive allowing us to compare today’s face with the face we had ten or twenty years ago.
But there’s something else we need to separate from that.
Wanting to change how we look isn’t new.
I didn’t spend my twenties looking in the mirror thinking, I have absolutely nailed this face. Nothing further required.
Quite the opposite. I changed my hair colour. I bought mascaras promising lashes that would apparently reach my eyebrows. I tried different foundations, lipsticks, hairstyles and skincare products. I was constantly looking for the next thing that might make me look a little more like the version of myself I had in my head.
And I wasn’t alone. Humans have been altering, decorating and enhancing their appearance for thousands of years. We change our hair, our clothes, our skin, our teeth and our bodies. We experiment. We improve. We accessorise. We try something new because we think we might like ourselves a little better that way.
We don’t generally regard that as evidence that we haven’t accepted ourselves. We regard it as being human.
So why would that instinct suddenly disappear when a woman turns 40 or 50?
Why should wanting better skin, a different haircut, fewer forehead lines or a stronger jawline suddenly become evidence that we haven’t “embraced ageing”?
Maybe wanting to improve ourselves isn’t the opposite of accepting ourselves. Maybe it’s simply what humans do.
I don’t need to have hated my face at 25 to want to change something about it at 42. I didn’t hate myself when I bought the mascara promising “extreme length.” I just thought my eyelashes could use a little assistance.
The fact that I’m older shouldn’t suddenly turn that same instinct into a character flaw.
So why is wanting to do something about it considered a problem?
This is where I really disagree with the “embrace ageing” message.
There is a huge difference between saying, “You don’t need to change your appearance to be worthy,” and saying, “If you want to change your appearance, you clearly haven’t accepted yourself.”
The first is liberating. The second is just another rule. And women have had enough rules.
For decades we’ve been told what we’re supposed to look like: thin, but not too thin; sexy, but not too sexy; youthful, but not immature; natural, but not too natural. Now we’re over 40 and apparently the new rule is: you must age gracefully – preferably while looking effortlessly fabulous.
I’m sorry, but no.
Sometimes I just don’t like something. There doesn’t necessarily have to be a deep psychological wound underneath it. I don’t need to fear death or secretly hate myself. Sometimes I look at a wrinkle and think, No thanks.
And here’s the double standard that gets me.
We already accept plenty of things people do to maintain or alter their appearance. Good skincare is self-care. Hair colour is grooming. Highlights are maintenance. Makeup is just getting ready. Nobody looks at a woman putting on lipstick and asks why she hasn’t accepted her natural lip shade.
But mention Botox and suddenly we’re analysing her relationship with ageing. Mention laser and apparently she’s fighting against the inevitable.
The treatments aren’t identical, of course. But they’re all deliberate choices about how we want to look. So why have we decided that some aesthetic interventions are perfectly acceptable ways to care for ourselves, while others are evidence that we haven’t accepted who we are?
If I straighten my teeth, nobody asks whether I’ve accepted my natural incisors. We just call it orthodontics.
Why does a woman wanting to soften a wrinkle suddenly require a character assessment?
Acceptance doesn’t mean doing nothing
I’m very pro getting older. I’m also very pro doing things that make you feel good about yourself. If you want Botox, get Botox. If you want laser, understand the treatment and its risks and choose a qualified practitioner. If you want fillers or surgery, that’s your choice. And if you’d rather do absolutely nothing to your face, that’s your choice too.
The point isn’t that one choice is better. It’s that the choice should belong to the woman making it.
Because I think we’ve confused acceptance with surrender.
I can accept that my skin is changing and still use retinol. I can accept that my face is ageing and still have Botox. I can accept my changing body and still work on my fitness.
Acceptance doesn’t have to mean, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” It can mean, “I know this is happening, I know I have choices, and I’m allowed to decide what I want to do about it.”
I don’t want to look 25
This is the distinction that gets lost.
I don’t want my twenties back. I like myself now. In many ways, I like myself much more. I have more confidence, more perspective and more self-awareness.
I don’t want to be younger. I just don’t necessarily want my face to make me feel significantly older than I feel.
I’m not trying to turn back time. I’m trying to reduce the distance between the person I experience myself as and the person I see in the mirror.
And if there are things I can do to make those two versions feel a little more aligned, why shouldn’t I?
Perhaps we’ve got “embrace ageing” wrong
Maybe embracing ageing isn’t about learning to love every wrinkle, proudly displaying every grey hair or proving that you have reached some enlightened state where you no longer care what you look like.
Unless, of course, that’s exactly what you want. In which case, grey away.
Maybe embracing ageing means embracing the fact that you get to decide what this next version of your life looks like.
It might mean signing up for a Hyrox competition because you suddenly want to see what your 42-year-old body can do. It might mean changing your diet, taking better care of your skin or finally finding a haircut that doesn’t make you look like someone’s exhausted aunt.
And yes, it might mean improving the lines on your forehead with a little Botox.
These choices aren’t evidence that you’re failing to accept your age. They might simply be evidence that you’re engaged with it.
Because accepting ageing doesn’t have to mean passively accepting every change that comes with it. It can mean accepting that you’re getting older while still having agency over how you want to look, feel and live as you do.
I’m not arguing that everyone needs to close the gap between how old they feel and how old they look. I’m arguing that if you want to close it, you shouldn’t have to feel ashamed for doing so.
Maybe that’s what we should actually mean when we tell women to embrace ageing.
Not “embrace looking older.”
Not “stop caring about your appearance.”
And certainly not “prove you’ve accepted yourself by doing nothing.”
Perhaps it means embracing the freedom that comes with knowing yourself well enough to decide what you want – whether that’s grey hair, great skin, a strong body, a little Botox, a lot of Botox, or absolutely none of the above.
Embrace your age. Embrace your choices. Embrace your agency.
You don’t have to look any particular way to prove that you’ve accepted your age.
And if closing the gap between how old you feel and how old you look makes you feel more like yourself?
Why the hell not?