How to Live With Your Aging Face and Not Worry About It

With the experience of so-called “everyday ageism” so prominent in the United States, it can be difficult to accept the fact that the calendar keeps plodding on. Rather than being proud of the fact that you’ve made it to the age that you are, avoiding all the threats that could shorten your life, the odds are that you wish you could patch over some of time’s effects on your body. Of these effects, the odds are also that you are concerned the most about time’s effects on your face.

Wrinkles and other facial changes are not the badge of courage they could be when the media pushes the narrative that these natural accompaniments to age must be disguised from view. Although the pressure to look young can affect anyone, it is women who seem to be most subject to this valuing of youth over age.

Why It Looks so Bad to Look Old

According to Charles University (Prague) researchers Michaela Honelová and Lucie Vidovićová (2023), “the contemporary ideal of femininity based on youth and attractiveness excludes the aging body from its boundaries, and aging women become socially marginalized and invisible in society.” However, if women go “too far” in their efforts to avoid this marginalization by trying to fix up their appearance, they can also suffer blowback. Looking young is important, but this must be done in a way that seems “effortless,” the authors point out.

Ageism itself can be understood as resulting in part, the authors maintain, from society’s view of the aging population as a threat to economic stability. However, another vantage point to understanding ageism comes from “terror management theory,” the proposition that people spend their lives trying to calm themselves from the fear (terror) of mortality. One way to accomplish this control is to marginalize older people, distancing yourself from them as much as possible.

Why ageism should affect women more than men, though, cannot be explained from this perspective. Instead, the “double jeopardy” that women experience occurs, according to a U.K. study on ageism in women by University of York’s Sue Westwood (2023), bias against older women is the flip side of the “hyper-sexualization of younger, able-bodied, women.” The situation isn’t exactly ideal for younger women, either, but for older women, the result is invisibility.

Plastic Surgery and the Need to Look Young

Honelová and Vidovićová maintain that the 20th century was the century of aesthetic (cosmetic) surgery, reflecting the combination of social inequalities due to gender roles and age. These trends are only continuing to grow, particularly among women, who compose an estimated 92 percent of all clients.

Aesthetic surgery is both expensive and theoretically unnecessary and, as such, presents unique professional challenges for the physicians who provide it. They are not providing “treatment” for a “real” need of a patient, and there is tremendous financial incentive for them to do so, putting their standards potentially in conflict with their profit margins. Because the surgery is so expensive, additionally, it is available only to those who have the financial resources to pay for it, as aesthetic surgery is not covered by health insurance. As the authors note, “Thus, aesthetic surgery has its unnoticed sociological overlaps as it evolves into a new social stratification and social exclusion axis.”

With all of these background factors in mind, the authors sought to gain an understanding of how they all play out in the individual decisions that women make to undergo these procedures. Drawing from a potential group of 640 previously published articles, the authors used established methodology to identify prominent themes among the 17 studies that fit their review criteria. Of these, 14 used survey methods, and the remaining three were based on qualitative interviews. The participants represented a range of ages in adulthood and were drawn from international samples. The surgery they were seeking was entirely done for “anti-aging” reasons.

The main themes that emerged from this comprehensive analysis fell into three categories, reflecting differing levels of influences ranging from broad cultural to individual and personal factors:

1. Macro level: These were society-wide factors including demographics associated with the market such as trying to get a better job. At this level also was public representation through the media, including exposure to television shows such as “Extreme Makeover” or “Embarrassing Bodies.”
2. Meso level: At this level, society-wide influences interact with individual actions. These reasons included fear of invisibility, communication through social networks, dissatisfaction in intimate relationships, and nonidentification with religions that would define cosmetic surgery as a sin,
3. Micro level: These are factors entirely within the individual, although these factors cannot be separated from the other two levels. They include lack of satisfaction with one’s body image, low self-esteem, and, importantly, fear and anxiety about aging.

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As you can see, these categories of influences are all based on the premise that a woman needs to change her appearance as she ages as the pressures from larger society penetrate into her own fear of becoming older and unattractive. The implications of these findings, as noted by the Czech authors, are that “aesthetic surgery can be a new axis of social inequality between women as the procedures will be perceived as a cultural norm, and not using them will be seen as a deviation from ‘normality.’” In other words, if you don’t go under the knife or the needle, you will be seen as an outlier.

Accepting Your Own Aging Face

This analysis of the motivation of women seeking the unneeded treatments to correct the natural course of life puts into sharp focus the impact of social attitudes toward aging in women’s feelings about their appearance. But how can you avoid succumbing to these feelings?

The first step you can take is to acknowledge the social prevalence of negative attitudes toward aging women in the media. How many ads can you count that depict an aging woman as unattractive or worse, invisible? The Westwood study showed, further, that the “grandmothering” of women is another contributor to this problem. See how many times an older woman is referred to as a grandmother rather than, say, as a lawyer, teacher, or just plain person?

Second, decide to take control over the decisions you make about that aging face of yours. You can still engage in behaviors that help you feel good about your appearance, and even if you do decide to visit that plastic surgeon’s office, set limits on both your expectations and the amount you’re willing to pay.

Finally, be part of the conversation that tries to change the narrative about aging women. There are an increasing number of role models in the media who do not seem to undergo cosmetic surgery, at least not in the extreme. They celebrate their gray or white hair, don’t mind a few wrinkles (which help them act better anyhow), and put forth a positive message about their shifting bodily shape. Think about someone like the late Chita Rivera, who didn’t receive her first Tony Award until she was 51 years old, and starred in the Tony award-winning musical “Kiss of the Spider Woman” 11 years later.

To sum up, aging is often described as “just a number,” but it’s not a number you have to hide. Knowing society’s pressures to look young can help give you the tools to accept yourself, face and all, no matter what that number is.