Madonna: her shocking “new face”
“With blond braids looped over her ears, dressed in a long black skirt and black jacket accessorised with a riding crop”, Madonna took to the stage at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles last week to introduce her fellow performers Sam Smith and Kim Petras. No one was really listening, though, to her kind words of support, said Jennifer Weiner in The New York Times. The watching world was far more interested in Madonna’s “preternaturally smooth and extravagantly sculpted face”.
The 64-year-old’s features looked “exaggerated, pushed and polished to an extreme”, as if she was some kind of “excessively contoured baby”. The effect was “more than slightly off”, and people noticed. “Madonna confuses fans over new face,” reported the New York Post.
She came back fighting, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail. She had a good old moan on social media about “a world that refuses to celebrate women past the age of 45”, and the “glare of ageism and misogyny” in which she is caught. “The world is threatened by my power and my stamina. My intelligence and my will to survive,” she declared – as if she had just crawled out of a collapsed building, rather than being “just back from the skin-plump clinic”. She has a point, though, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. People do seem horrified when women age, no matter how they do it. The latest of Madonna’s many reinventions has forced her “uneasy audience” to think about the very hard work that goes into female beauty. Was her new face, perhaps, a statement against the “anti-ageing industrial complex”?
Well, maybe, said Janice Turner in The Times. Personally, I just thought it was a sad sight to see – “an immovable mask of Botox and fillers” stretched over Madonna’s “lovely bones”. I’d have liked to see her at 64, “insouciant about wrinkles, writing reflective songs about growing old”. But even she seems to have to caved in to the expectation that women must look young – though men such as The Rolling Stones “can cavort into their 80s without an hour in the beautician’s chair”. I suppose there is, though, something grimly impressive about Madonna’s refusal to live by other people’s rules. “She has chosen looking extraterrestrial over looking old.”