Midlife grooming
At this stage, it’s a nonnegotiable necessity
Apparently Jennifer Aniston spends upwards of £70,000 annually on looking as good as she does. It’s breathtaking! Sheer lunacy! “Imagine shelling out that amount on
maintenance,” we shouted at each other when we discovered this ridiculous state of affairs, while some of us (women over 45) were simultaneously thinking, “I am so due a roots retouch. And a trim. Must book in for a leg wax, or shall I wait a week and get the upper lip done at the same time? God, what about my nails…” We glanced through the list of all the things Jen is said to do in order to keep herself in shiny Hollywood shape while chuckling and thinking: do not remind me of the cost of this stuff. I do not want to know.
We may not be talking ultrasound facials and bosom lifts, but we civilians have our own issues with grooming. The growing list of unmissable beauty appointments and purchases is the midlife woman’s dirty little secret. We don’t even admit the extent of the problem to ourselves. We’re not fully aware of it, is the truth, because the whole concept of maintenance has crept up on us and we still refuse to believe that we’re grooming the way Joan Collins was circa 1980, only without the results.
That’s the thing about maintenance-creep. You trundle along happily, reaching for a Bic razor occasionally and slapping on some Oil of Olay when your skin gets flaky, and the next thing you know you are locked into the grooming cycle of a Sports Illustrated model. You’ve got appointments booked every six weeks for this (roots retouching) and every five for that (waxing) and then there are the regular hair appointments and the exercise class and you are panic buying wrinkle-reducing serum and brown spot erasing cream, and not because any of this is fun. It is – at this stage – a non-negotiable necessity: the difference between people wanting to talk to us/employ us/ let their children hang out with our children, and being consigned to the dustbin of life.
And each year the list gets longer and the time frame tighter. I’m talking about suddenly going to the hairdresser as often as you used to go to the pub. Pedicures were once a high-summer luxury; now you need a strong-armed professional to get some leverage on your toenails and heel rind. Don’t get me started on waxing. My waxing lady says it’s incorrect to call hairs on your upper lip a tache, but whatever it is, it means increasingly frequent visits. And then there are the other hair removal needs, which are certainly not tailing off. (You could try doing this yourself, at home, but once you have accidentally got wax caught in places you weren’t intending to wax, you will never try it again.)
All of this costs a fortune and for natural non-groomers, who just happen to be falling apart, it’s painful – like a teetotaller having to pay for everyone else’s booze after dinner in a restaurant. You think: why am I getting sucked into this lark? But it’s not easy to opt out of the midlife maintenance game. For a start, there are all the natural groomers who can’t wait to try out another jaw-tightening facial, and they’re driving up the grooming standard.
And then there are men. From their late forties onwards they start dieting like ballet dancers, and “looking after themselves a bit more” (we encouraged that, more fool us) and pretty soon they are casting critical glances in your direction when you chortle that your calves are as hairy as a goat’s. It turns out that what we thought was a choice, an option you embraced if you were a toy-dog-and-plasticsurgery sort of person, is now a compulsory feature of modern life. At least when the wear and tear starts to show.
‘Suddenly, you’re going to the hairdresser as often as you used to go to the pub’