the art of GROWING UP

The one-way road to 40 isn’t always a smooth ride. Meg Mason isn’t apologising

Nothing makes a woman look so old as trying desperately hard to look young,” said Coco Chanel. Which was perfectly fine for her. She never had to video conference in fluorescent lighting. She never woke up and reached for her phone, missing Instagram and opening the camera flipped to facing instead, only to discover that Gargamel was in her bed and wearing her PJS. And she had a wardrobe full of Chanel, which would go a long way to mitigating the experience of getting older and trying to be fine with it.

Ageing is strange. It’s confusing. For a long time, our twenties and into our thirties, we get not to think about it. When we hear all the chatter about wrinkles and retinol, about celebs who are “ageless” and Elle Macpherson’s “wrinkling” knees, we don’t listen, believing ourselves to be immune. When we go out, we dab on a little tinted SPF, in deference to the vague idea of our future selves, but otherwise we feel impervious to the things other women worry about. Then one day, we don’t want to go out without Morning Showgrade concealer, and that’s only to move the car.

This is ageing. When we arrive here, at whatever arbitrary age we do, every one of us has to decide how we’re going to play it. “Ageing is out of your control,” Diane von Furstenberg has said. “How you handle it, though, is in your hands.”

So, will we Helen Mirren our way through this next bit, or Real Housewives the shit out of it, acid-peeling ourselves into oblivion? Perhaps we’ll flick-flack between the two extremes, feeling sexy and confident one day, practically sorry for poor twenty-somethings still working things out, and the next day, achingly, viscerally jealous of their plentiful collagen production. Why are they not more grateful, actually? Why are they not happier in themselves? Then again, why weren’t we?

“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26.” We know the Nora Ephron quote. We have it written down. “If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re 34.” We thought she was being funny. Now we see she was deadly serious. Regret is part of the process: that we didn’t take that job, that we should have worn a hat, that we didn’t marry that man or that we did.

Ephron wrote about turtlenecks and changing her mind on cosmetic surgery and we start to understand that, too. The bold positions we took on those things – when we didn’t need them – are back on the table. If like Jennifer Aniston we swore we’d never “inject shit” into our

“WE SWEAR WE’D NEVER ‘INJECT SHIT’ IN OUR FACES, THEN SEE A PHOTO AND THINK, MAYBE JUST SOME TOPSHELF SHIT”