There is a particular kind of compliment that appears underneath almost every photograph of a woman who has been famous for more than about fifteen years.
“Oh my God, she looks exactly the same.”
“She hasn’t aged a day!”
“She literally hasn’t changed since the 90s.”
Except she has.
Of course she has.
And that shouldn’t be an insult.
I understand where these comments come from. They are almost always intended kindly. Nobody types “she hasn’t aged a day” thinking they are contributing to some enormous cultural problem surrounding women and aging. They are trying to say that a woman looks beautiful.
But why have we decided that one of the greatest compliments we can give a woman is to pretend that time has somehow failed to happen to her?
Aging is not something we need to politely ignore
Look at a photograph of almost any actress at 25 and then another photograph of her at 45, 55 or 65, and yes, she will probably look different.
Her face might be softer. There might be lines around her eyes. Her jawline might have changed. Her hair might be different. There may be changes that are difficult to pinpoint but obvious simply because twenty, thirty or forty years have passed between the photographs.
And still, without fail:
“She looks EXACTLY the same!”
No, she doesn’t.
And that’s fine.
We seem to treat visible aging almost like an embarrassing physical characteristic that good manners require us not to mention. We collectively squint at a photograph of someone who very clearly looks twenty years older than she did twenty years ago and insist that we cannot see it.
The intention is complimentary. The implication isn’t nearly as kind.
Because underneath “you haven’t aged a day” sits an unspoken assumption:
Aging would have been a bad thing.
Why does youth have to be the compliment?
There are so many things we could say instead.
She looks beautiful.
She looks happy.
She looks confident.
She has incredible style.
She’s still brilliant at what she does.
She’s funny. She’s talented. She’s interesting. She’s accomplished.
Or—and here’s a revolutionary idea—we could talk about something she has actually done rather than immediately assessing how successfully her face has resisted the passage of time.
Women do not need to remain visually frozen at the age when the public first decided they were attractive in order to remain worthy of admiration.
An actress who became famous at 24 does not owe us her 24-year-old face when she is 54.
A singer doesn’t become less talented because there are lines around her eyes.
A presenter doesn’t become less charismatic because her face has changed.
A woman doesn’t lose value because you can tell that time has passed.
I wouldn’t believe you anyway
If somebody showed me a photograph of myself at 20 and then looked at me now and said, “Oh my God, you haven’t aged a day,” I wouldn’t think, What a wonderful compliment.
I’d think, Well, that’s obviously not true.
I have aged.
I know I have aged because I was physically present for all of the intervening years.
My face has changed. My body has changed. I am not supposed to look exactly as I did when I was 20.
And I don’t particularly want a compliment that requires both of us to participate in an obvious lie.
Tell me I look good.
Tell me you like my hair.
Tell me my outfit is fantastic.
Tell me I look happy.
Tell me I’m funny or clever or interesting.
But you don’t have to pretend I’ve somehow discovered the secret to bending spacetime in order to say something nice about me.
“She looks good for her age” isn’t much better
And while we’re here, can we retire this one too?
“She looks amazing for 50.”
“He looks great for 70.”
What does “for 50” actually add?
If somebody looks amazing, they look amazing.
Attaching an age qualifier turns the compliment into a comparison with an imaginary standard of how bad we apparently expect people of that age to look.
There isn’t a point at which attractiveness suddenly becomes remarkable because somebody has managed to retain it despite the terrible misfortune of continuing to exist.
Women are allowed to become visibly older
This matters particularly for women because youth and beauty have been tangled together for generations.
Women in public life are scrutinised for aging, while simultaneously being scrutinised for whatever they do to avoid looking like they’re aging.
Get Botox and people complain that your face doesn’t move.
Don’t get Botox and somebody circles your wrinkles in a tabloid photograph.
Have cosmetic surgery and you’ve “ruined your face.”
Age naturally and you’ve “let yourself go.”
Then, when a woman appears publicly looking completely normal for her age, thousands of people rush to reassure her that she somehow doesn’t look it.
Maybe we don’t need to reassure her.
Maybe looking 50 when you are 50 is not a problem requiring reassurance.
We are more than evidence of our own youth
There is something deeply limiting about treating eternal youth as an achievement.
Getting older means you have lived.
Your face isn’t a failed version of the one you had at 25. Your current body isn’t an inferior copy of your younger body. You haven’t done aging incorrectly because somebody can look at you and accurately guess that several decades have occurred.
And perhaps we should be particularly conscious of this when talking about women whose careers span decades.
Instead of marvelling that an actress supposedly “hasn’t aged” since the film she made in 1998, perhaps we could marvel that she has maintained a career for nearly thirty years.
Instead of comparing photographs looking for evidence that time has somehow spared her, we could talk about what she has created during that time.
Because the years themselves are not the problem.
You can see my age. I’m still worthy.
I don’t want us to replace one impossible beauty standard with another. Nobody needs to “embrace every wrinkle” or feel delighted about every physical change that comes with getting older. We’re allowed complicated feelings about our own faces and bodies.
But we could stop treating visible youthfulness as the ultimate compliment.
We don’t need to tell women that they haven’t aged.
We don’t need to insist that they look twenty years younger.
We don’t need to qualify beauty with “for her age.”
And we definitely don’t need to pretend we can’t see something perfectly normal happening right in front of us.
You can see that I’ve aged.
You can see that my face has changed.
You can see that I’m older than I used to be.
That’s okay.
I am still beautiful. I am still interesting. I am still capable. I am still worthy of being seen, admired, hired, desired, listened to and taken seriously.
I don’t need to look eternally youthful for any of those things to be true.
None of us do.
“She looks good for her age” isn’t much better
And while we’re here, can we retire this one too?
“She looks amazing for 50.”
“You look great for your age.”
If somebody said that to me, I’d probably respond, “I’m 37, not 95.”
What exactly is “for your age” supposed to mean? At what age do we apparently cross an invisible threshold where simply looking good becomes an impressive achievement?
If somebody looks amazing, they look amazing.
Attaching an age qualifier turns the compliment into a comparison with an imaginary standard of how bad we apparently expect people of that age to look.
And perhaps that’s part of the problem. We’ve become so accustomed to treating aging as deterioration that we talk about women in their thirties, forties and fifties as though looking attractive at those ages is somehow beating the odds.
I’m 37. Of course I don’t look exactly as I did at 20. But I’m also not an archaeological discovery.
There isn’t a point at which attractiveness suddenly becomes remarkable because somebody has managed to retain it despite the terrible misfortune of continuing to exist.
Next time you feel like complimenting a woman, let’s not lie.
Age is not a failure we need to cover up.
