Joyfully high maintenance or resolutely natural... how will YOU look this good at 60?
Two women who look sensational aged sixty —but with two very different approaches. So . . .
BOTOX WON’T MAKE ME LOOK 25 AGAIN
by Frances Hardy I HAD the joy of reaching the milestone of 60 last summer. I’ve always been happy to own up to my age. Why be coy about it? Far better, in my view, to be considered good for 60 than shave off a decade and have people think I’m raddled for 50.
In fact, I’m quite glad to be my age. I’ve never raged against the passing of youth. What’s the point? I can’t bring it back. Botox (I’ve never had it) won’t make me look 25 again, just a preternaturally youthful version of myself. And once I succumb to it, I reason, I’ll never be able to stop or my skin will crumple like a screwed-up paper bag; the ravages of time I’ve been fending off will suddenly manifest themselves in a network of rivulets and wrinkles.
Friends will gasp in horror. Far better just to be myself. It would be disingenuous to pretend I don’t try at all to ward off old age. Of course I do. I wage an incessant battle against weight gain: once you pass mid-life, so the saying goes, you become either a pin cushion or a pin. (I’ll never be a pin.)
SUPERFLUOUS pounds have gathered in unexpected places — I’ve got a fat back, for goodness sake! — so as often as I can I attend gym classes full of younger women, which taxes and tests me.
I’ve dyed my dark hair, too, since I was 34, when a Cruella de Vil stripe of white appeared on one side of my head. I was clearly never going to acquire an even speckling of salt and pepper and I wasn’t ready to embrace the drama of variegated hair at that stage. (Although today I’m starting to think I could.)
So, for almost three decades, I’ve been in thrall to the tyranny of the six-weekly tint. Often I do it, inexpertly, myself. (My puritanical streak feels it’s a gross indulgence to spend money on my appearance.)
Besides, I can think of a million-and-one things I’d rather do than sit in a salon for hours waiting for a dye to take — such as walking along a breezy beach, for starters — which is probably another reason I’m so resolutely low-maintenance.
Following the example of my mum, whose cleansing routine is a brisk wipe with a coarse flannel, soap and water, I don’t spend much on rejuvenating face creams, figuring the claims they make are largely baloney. That said, I swear by Boots No 7 Lift & Luminate serum and the restorative effects of M&S’s Formula Absolute Ultimate Sleep Cream.
I probably won’t feel quite so sanguine when I reach my eighth decade, but there is plenty to love about being 60. I didn’t actually believe the cliché until I got here, but age really has brought the self-assurance and confidence that I lacked in my youth.
As a young woman, and even into middle age, I was besieged by self-doubt and shyness. I believed that anything I achieved was more through luck than skill or judgment. But as the years have passed I’ve realised it can’t just be a fluke that I’m still earning a living from journalism. I must be OK at it.
Age, too, gives us a special dispensation to be eccentric; even a little wild. The poet Jenny Joseph resolved to become an elderly maverick, to wear purple with a red hat that doesn’t go and to fritter her pension on brandy, summer gloves and satin sandals to make up for the sobriety of her youth.
She was on to something. When we’re middle-aged we’re still shackled to lives of prudent conformity. We must pay our mortgages, educate our children; set an example of providence and hard work.
blessed to have a wonderful family: Iain, my partner of 22 years, a daughter and two stepchildren. And now I’m 60 and their teens are long past; the angst of exams is over as well as the anguish of the empty nest, and we’re no longer supporting them through their studies.
All have graduated from university and are ensconced in careers and homes of their own. We also have a granddaughter, aged two, and look forward with delight to more.
So my 60s will be an era of expanding horizons, not diminishing ones. I feel I’ve a good few adventures in me yet. I’d like to sleep under a desert sky sprinkled with stars, visit all the great art galleries of the world and tramp along coastal paths until my boot soles wear down to wafers.
I look at my mum — now aged 90 and living with resolute independence on a remote Welsh mountain with her flock of sheep — and hope to emulate her. She always has a project — she’s just bought a coop of hens and plans to renovate her barns — and believes that, while she has something to get up for in the morning, she’ll stay mentally alert and youthful.
It’s nice, too, that at her venerable age she thinks of me as ‘still just a girl’.
Of course, there are things about being 60 that don’t fill me with delight. I’m not mad about having bags under my eyes.
However, there’s a lot to be said for countering the physical signs of ageing with cheerfulness. ‘Wear a smile and have friends. Wear a scowl and have wrinkles,’ wrote George Eliot, long before a multibillion-pound cosmetics industry had convinced us that serums and unguents were the route to both contentment and eternal youth.
So my motto, trite as it is, tends to be: think positive. Smile. And don’t fritter away precious time trying to stem the manifestations of age, because the task is ultimately fruitless. Breathe some fresh air instead. Take a brisk walk. Dig the garden. It will do more to lift the spirits than an afternoon spent in a salon.
I’ve heard women my age say they envy their daughters’ youth and beauty. Why not celebrate it, and bask in its reflected glory?
I’ve just returned from a weekend in Budapest with my 26-yearold daughter — her present to me for my 60th — where I was amused to see waiters flirt with her. Me? I might just as well have been invisI’m
ible. I’m 60 and, touch wood, I’m healthy. My only regret is that I’ve got fewer years ahead of me on earth than I have behind. But that’s all the more reason to savour every moment.
€51k on my face is an investment
by Amanda Platell SOME weeks ago, a childhood friend and I were climbing into a taxi after the theatre. The cabbie turned and said: ‘Did you and your mum have a good night?’
It was mortifying. My friend, Claire, and I have both just turned 60, yet she is the first to admit I look decades younger.
I could see she was upset, but then she said she knew why he’d made the mistake. I’ve spent most of my adult life in Britain, while she had swapped the searing Australian sun for the equally punishing glare of Los Angeles.
She’d been a sun worshipper all her life, while I adored the grey and drizzle of London. My idea of a sunshine holiday is SPF 50, a hat and shade, while she would bake herself. And there is nothing more ageing to skin than the sun.
Yet it’s not just my love of the shade that has helped me hold back the years. Seventeen years of state-of-the-art, non-surgical treatments have helped, too! From peels and lasers on my face and neck to treatments to remove age spots on my hands, they have all made a difference.
For my 60th birthday, I gave myself a thread lift. A fairly uncomfortable procedure, it involves injecting fine threads into your skin that tighten and lift your face back to where it belongs.
It’s especially effective around the jawline, removing those saggy bits that come inevitably with age, but also lifts the cheeks and redefines cheekbones. Prices range from €674-€2,135 depending on what you have done. I had the full face and upper neck minus the upper lip, which set me back €2,026. A week later, once the slight bruising had gone, my face looked remarkably younger.
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HY didn’t I treat myself to a holiday for my 60th, or new clothes? Simply because, for me, turning 60 is the worst milestone I’ve reached. I dreaded it and, for the first time in my life, felt daunted by my age and feared I would be defined by it.
Once I reached 60, could I still look glamorous, or would I be like mutton dressed as lamb?
I was never pretty, certainly not beautiful. An interviewer once described me as ‘tall, dark and handsome’. I’m happy to settle for that, yet feared I’d wake up at 60 an old lady.
Of course, I didn’t and, surprisingly, once the big day was over, I was relieved. Time to get on with the rest of my life and the great years ahead, God willing. But it helped that I knew I didn’t
look 60, simply thanks to the years and money I’ve invested in warding off the visible effects of ageing. As a single woman with no children, that’s where the school fees I didn’t have to find went!
It’s also partly because of the rapid development of so-called ‘tweakments’ over the past two decades. I’m not ashamed to say I’ve been a devotee, some might say guinea pig, of most procedures that don’t require a knife.
In researching the work I’ve had done, I was quite shocked to note that I began my non-surgical journey 17 years ago, aged 43.
Back then, it was chemical peels which left you looking like a burn victim for weeks, or Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) to soften fine lines and wrinkles. Those early treatments made your face swollen and bruised — there was so much downtime required, you’d spend days, sometimes a week, hiding at home.
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NE Obagi Blue Peel left me with such a sickly pale blue hue for a week that I couldn’t even venture into M&S. I had Botox then, too, but didn’t much like the frozen feeling it gave me. Now I have ‘baby’ Botox about once a year at €438 each session (many women have it four times a year), which is a more subtle, delicate approach that still allows your face to move.
There have been yearly sessions of €393 BBL, a broadband light that stings like hell but removes blemishes such as spider veins (from too much wine), age spots and other sun damage, while stimulating collagen production.
Collagen is essential to keeping your skin looking young, but we lose 1% of it each year from our mid-20s. So, by 60, it is somewhat depleted and its absence leads to deep lines.
Any procedure that stimulates collagen production gives longterm results, but you do have to keep it up.
I’ve also had Ultherapy, a highlyfocused ultrasound that lifts saggy jawlines, cheeks and brows, for a cool €3,147. Fortunately, only one session was needed.
Pelleve was another success, a radiofrequency skin-tightening treatment good for wrinkle reduction around the eyes and top lip.
And the €618 PRP Vampire Facial, in which your own blood plasma is reinjected into your face, gave excellent results. Not for the faint-hearted, but it worked.
These days, you can have effective treatments like the non-surgical laser Kleresca in your lunch hour and go back to work afterwards, as I did last year (and will do next).
In fact, I’ve probably had two procedures every year since I began. I must have spent around €50,600 in 17 years — a staggering sum, I know — or €2,970 a year, not including makeup, hair and so on.
Yet apart from my mortgage, the money I’ve spent this way been the best investment of my life.
I was brought up to take care of myself. Both my parents always said you can have brains and an education, but if you look scruffy, people will take you less seriously.
Every woman likes to feel powerful and attractive and a large part of that comes from what you see in the mirror. I see no reason why that formula for a happy life should change just because you’re 60.
I don’t view these treatments as a form of self-harm, which some people do, but as a type of advanced grooming. To me, lasers and peels are like lipstick and mascara — I don’t leave home without them. Some women want to age naturally — not me. While I’m not raging against the passing of youth, I am absolutely trying to slow it down and I’m honest about that.
I make no apologies for taking care of my appearance, not at 60 or beyond. It’s not cheap, but I’d rather remove two years of wrinkles than buy a new handbag.
There is no shame in wanting to look as good as you can for as long as you can. Millions of women do it and so should you. Think of it as the new way to age gracefully.