MIRROR IMAGE Watching your teenage daughter experiment with make-up can trigger complex feelings.
Watching your teenage daughter grow into her looks and experiment with make-up can trigger complex feelings. Kathleen Baird-Murray maps the emotional terrain.
Car journeys are when most of our significant conversations happen. I complain about the music on one radio channel and Manu, my 15-year-old daughter, obligingly moves the channel to another, informing me: “It’s what old people listen to before they admit what they really want is Magic.” Simultaneously, she deftly applies winged eyeliner in the passenger-seat mirror. While the age gap may have closed – we wear similar make-up, we both shop in Topshop, we go to music festivals – today’s teenagers have other ways of reminding us we’re getting a little older. Like radio stations.
I imagine a time in the long-forgotten past when all that work preparing one’s daughter for a prosperous marrying-off – the gowns, the hair, the dance cards – might have sent even the most beautiful, most confident of mothers rushing to their dressing-table mirrors to wipe away the tears of sadness as they lamented the gradual fading of their own looks. For our generation, however, that heart-wrenching moment your daughter becomes a beauty in her own right is less well defined.
Today, the passage of time isn’t so much marked by our awareness of any Jungian Electra complex: that classic, oftdramatised scenario of a sexually ambitious younger women encroaching on an older woman’s loved one, like Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash. The marriage proposal of WB Yeats to Iseult Gonne, the beautiful daughter of his lover Maud Gonne (thankfully, she said no) is seemingly only ever played out now on tabloid TV shows and is not, one hopes, an everyday occurrence.
No, today’s version of stealing beauty is more like a slow process of attrition. Our teenage daughters age us by wearing us out with late-night taxi pick-ups, school anxieties and parties where the guests’ bags have to be checked for smuggled-in bottles of vodka, or worse. And then, one day, you’re doing the school run, full of admiration for her makeup skills, when you realise you haven’t seen your hairbrush for three days, never mind opened your make-up bag. Perhaps it isn’t so much about what you see in the mirror as a decline in the effort you put in.
Unlike most teenagers, Manu has all the tools at her disposal, thanks to the constant drip-feed of cosmetics into our home: an occupational hazard when you write about beauty for a living, as I do. As a result, strobing, contouring and countless other make-up trends that my cynical 48-year-old self dismisses as gimmicky are quickly and effortlessly mastered, which can be really useful for my work. At times I’m reminded of the witty and incisive play by April De Angelis, Jumpy, where the Tasmin Greig character complains that she can’t leave the house while her teenage daughter revises for her high school exams. “She wouldn’t actually apply herself. The only thing she applies with any diligence is eyeliner.”
Meanwhile, I wait patiently for Manu to discover the freedom that comes with leaving the house bare-faced, not giving a damn.
ONE DAY, YOU’RE DOING THE SCHOOL RUN WHEN YOU REALISE YOU HAVEN’T SEEN YOUR HAIRBRUSH FOR THREE DAYS
I ask Sylvie Chantecaille, founder of the eponymous beauty line and mother of two grown-up daughters, whether she, working in an industry fuelled by the pursuit of youth, ever experiences pangs of jealousy as her daughters blossomed? Of course not, she replies. “I think it’s a man’s idea! We are way too connected to our children to experience this feeling. If anything, we have pangs of anxiety as they mature. I remember my mother staying up all night when I was out at Castel or New Jimmy’s, and I just thought she was silly. And yet, there is definitely a pride, rather than jealousy, if your child is different to you, let’s say if they have great legs and you did not. It’s almost as if you had them too! The symbiosis is so strong that you form a unit. Whatever happens to one, happens to the other.”
Pride, yes, but I’m sure we’re also celebrating seeing our girls become more confident, and perhaps that’s why the ritualistic make-up application is more important at their age than it is at ours. That much quoted (by me, usually) Nora Ephron line, “Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was 26. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini and don’t take it off until you’re 34”, is even more pertinent for girls today.
Looking at my daughter, seeing her long, slim, gazelle-like legs, I know she’ll be cringing reading this, just as I cringed whenever I received any compliments at her age. And in the same way that I never thought I was beautiful as a teen, I don’t suspect my daughter thinks she is, either. My “blossoming”, if you like (and what a ghastly word that is), could not have been more different from hers. We were forbidden from wearing make-up, were only ever in front of a mirror for a few minutes at a time, and had I been at a school sophisticated enough to have such a thing as an American-style yearbook, I’d definitely have been labelled “Girl Least Likely To Become a Beauty Editor”. I’m not sure that wearing make-up to a professional level makes this generation of young women any more confident, in fact, I know it doesn’t, inviting comment and judgment from their peers for those brave enough to put their pictures up on social media.
But what I am envious of is the freedom, the fun that is getting ready for a party with a group of girlfriends, the time to experiment with different looks (although again, there’s nothing wildly experimental about the inspirations available to today’s teens, which can pretty much all be traced back to one or other member of the Kardashian family). Frankly, I’d just like to make friends with my hairbrush again.
What I do know is that pride in one’s offspring must come with its own checks and balances, and it’s probably best kept quiet. My parents tried not to show it, but I often felt conscious of their pride in the way I looked, something that drove me crazy. My mother’s eyes would light up if I ever stuck my hair up on my head in a tatty elastic band. “Oh, I love it when your hair’s up, you look just like my mother!” she’d say. I doubted that very much: my Burmese grandmother’s hair was always immaculate, worn in a chignon and strewn with fresh jasmine flowers. As soon as I knew how happy it made my mother to see me like that, obviously (and I’m slightly ashamed to admit this) I avoided wearing it that way. I couldn’t cope with the fuss, the compliments, the attention.
“Some mothers take great delight in their children’s beauty and consider it an object to be displayed,” says consultant psychotherapist Jane Haynes. There is, she explains, a gradual and natural transition that takes place, whereby the mother has to come to terms with the fact that as her daughter moves from childhood to puberty, she will lose control. “The hair that she may have loved brushing with a pink Mason Pearson hairbrush is suddenly no longer hers to brush,” says Haynes.
How we cope with this transition all depends on how narcissistic we think we are, and how healthy we believe vanity to be. “Mothers who have not been objects of beauty are more likely to enjoy and take pride in their daughter’s independent beauty,” says Haynes.
I’m not sure my own mother ever felt sadness about her “looks fading”, because obviously, in my eyes as a child, and then as a teenager, she was always ancient anyway. But I do remember her sheer delight one day in her late 60s, when my father surprised her by digging out some old photos of her in Capri, framing them and hanging them on the kitchen walls for all to see. There she was, one leg artfully arranged in front of the other, a Lambretta and a clifftop in the background, in one of those pneumatic bikinis, every bit the 50s pin-up.
I ask Manu what she thinks about all this. Yes, she says, she finds it irritating how some celebrity mothers constantly seem to parade their teenage daughters’ beauty publicly on Instagram: it always feels forced. Is that to mask the envy, she wonders? And then she is indignant I’ve even been asked to write this article. “So they’re saying you’re getting old and ugly while I’m not, so you’re jealous?” she asks, typically cutting straight to the chase.
“Well, not exactly,” I say, “but that’s what some people think happens between mums and daughters.”
“But that’s ridiculous!” she says. “That would mean you can only be beautiful if you’re young. Loads of older women are beautiful.”
And I can’t help but smile to myself, happy in the knowledge that for all my failings on the school run, when it comes to teaching my daughter what really matters about beauty, my work is done.