GETTING ON WITH GETTING ON
The Monthly magazine, May 2006.


If I had woken up 15 years ago with the face I have now, I would have screamed the house down. Not even with the filthiest of hangovers would my eyelids have been this droopy, the lines between my eyebrows so deep, the bags under my eyes such a precise storm-cloud grey. And if I sleep on my side, I have cleavage wrinkles until 10.15 am.

You know what's gone wrong, don't you? It's the 15 years. I'm 43 years old. The same age as Catherine Zeta Jones. Five years younger than Sharon Stone, who looks 24 - admittedly a gushing, bonkers 24-year-old whose face was taken off in a wheat-threshing accident, and then was sewn back on, only higher and tighter. She looks odd and a bit wrong, but she doesn't look 48. Paying to look strangely alien is now preferable to looking older and real for free.

If one more man says something like "Oh, has Sharon Stone had some work done?", I will slap. Here's a hint: if a woman was starring in movies 15 years ago and she's still in movies, she hasn't so much "had work done" as had her entire head reconstructed. It's a wonder they always manage to find the ears again to put back on the sides.

The question becomes not "have they had work done?" but "is it good work, or bad?". Or, why do Madonna and Nicole Kidman have skin that looks like a peeled boiled egg? Why don't their foreheads move? It's very hard to put your finger on (possibly literally), but somebody who has altered their face, either permanently or temporarily, always looks wrong. Sometimes they look a very lot wrong (Mary Tyler-Moore, Melanie Griffith) sometimes they look expressionless kind of wrong, and sometimes they seem sort of fine except there's something just wrong with a face that seems to bear no relation to their age, neck, hands, or life experience.

Some of the chaps are getting it done, but usually later than the women. Blokes are allowed to look battle "hardened", "grizzled","rugged" and "tough" for longer. Apply the same words to an older woman and see how far you get. There's a squad of older actors with ruched faces, such as Bob Hoskins, Harrison Ford, Sean Connery, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood (actually I think finally he's succumbed), Michael Douglas (sorry, how did his name get in here?) Burt Reynolds (okay, stopping now). But representing the ladies of an ineluctable age we have....oh. Bear with me. Um...Dame Judy Dench. And Dame Maggie Smith.

Dick Cheney, the vice-president of the US, goes around having heart attacks and shooting people in the face, but he's still allowed to look like a walrus in formaldehyde. Senator Hilary Clinton and every other senior female politician there already has a face that's a-little-bit-wrong-but-at-least-not-actually-old.

If you don't think the cosmetic fiddling phase has reached Australia yet, get an eyeful of some of our newsreaders, current affairs presenters and other telly spokesfaffers.

Even in their 20s, some women are having injections of collagen and other lip-plumping treatments and Botox poison (which slowly absorb back into the body). Botox temporarily paralyse muscles, which prevents facial expressions and the lines they cause. It comes in standard "units", each of which is enough to kill a mouse. A cosmetic dose to paralyse wrinkles is anything from 25 to 60 units.

An Australian "cosmetic physician" (lordy) told a newspaper magazine recently that he regularly injects his wife's face with Botox. "I use it in the vertical creases between her eyebrows, in her crows' feet and to sculpt her brow ... if anything I'd say me giving her Botox has prevented arguments. We get on better because she doesn't have that frown that makes her look angry and unapproachable." What will the man do when his wife shows signs of real ageing or annoyance? Remove her head? And this woman has two small daughters. Why they're not running screaming from the house I don't know. I take that back. Why they're not all chasing him from the house with flaming torches and unapproachable expressions is beyond me.

All the women's magazines, from the glossy imports of Allure and Vogue to the local gossip tabloids regard cosmetic surgery and more temporary procedures (of the Spakfilla and rigid muscle variety) as par for the course. Side-effects are almost never enumerated. Even www.awfulplasticsurgery.com (with freak show before-and-after pictures of celebrities) is accompanied by ads for cosmetic surgery.

Of course being skinny with big bosoms (rarely achieved without brutal dieting and exercise, and saline-filled bazoombas) is considered necessary for any Hollywood actress, who may at any moment have to pout and pose almost entirely in the nuddy for Vanity Fair magazine's celebrity photographers, even if, as in the case of Desperate Housewife star Teri Hatcher, her interview is about being sexually abused as a child.

But what of ordinary us? What leads normal folk down this drastic path, now so well-trodden it has become humdrum and unquestioned? A friend recently asked for advice about a woman where he works: she suddenly turned up to work after a holiday with new, gigantic breasts. "What's the protocol?" he asked. "Don't say anything and don't look at them," was my advice. "Yeah, that's what I thought", he nodded. Well, you can't say "Phwoarr" because it would be rude and unprofessional, and you can't say "Did you hate yourself so much, that you paid people to mutilate you in this unnecessary way? You were beautiful enough before, and I'm so sorry you couldn't see that," because that would hurt her feelings and/or make her cry. Instead, everyone will feel weird and pretend not to notice.

Another friend of a friend was recently shocked at a post-injections photo of herself. "I have got trout-pout," she observed. Her girlfriends don't want to tell her how much food and drink she dribbles from her de-sensitised mouth in the week after her injections, either. Anyway, then she went off for the next lot.

Perhaps we could all be happier if we adopted the approach of yet another Dame, romance authoress Barbara Cartland, who sank into her lolly-pink, chiffon-swathed, chintz-addled elderly years with a platinum coiffure that made every individual hair count, peering through squished spider mascara. In each talon tipped with duco-strength nail polish she clutched a Pekinese dyed the colour of fairy-floss, as she happily dictated some dreadful piffle to a minion. The Dame had taken to rubbing some extract of honey on her face and was pleasantly astonished as it erased wrinkles from her ancient face. "After one application," she said, "I found my skin was softer and much less lined." The fact that this happened at the same time as she was losing her sight simply never occurred to her.

It's a faultless strategy and one I commend to us all as we sag gracelessly into a future where we look old and tired , but we refuse to acknowledge it. Although in my case, I don't want to bother with the Pekinese.