There’s a scene in The Substance, the gnarly body horror hit of the year, that still haunts me. Demi Moore’s washed-up starlet Elisabeth Sparkle has woken up hideously aged, realising that her body-swapped younger self Sue has been siphoning off her youth.
Sue stays alive for longer; Sparkle, on the other hand, is atrophying with decay. But while the mysterious creators of her anti-ageing potion advise that she can stop at any time, Moore’s character simply can’t give it up. She will literally kill herself so Sue can stay taut-skinned and successful.
Director Coralie Fergaut said that she was compelled to make the film after turning 40 and being consumed by thoughts that she was over the hill, or in her words: “My life is over. I’m going to be erased from the society [sic].”
It’s no surprise that her film, now tipped for Oscar glory, hit a nerve with audiences: nobody really knows how to talk about age anymore, particularly when it comes to women.
After all, this was the year that age discourse dominated the internet. My feed was populated with viral photos and videos of celebrities I remember from my childhood – Lindsay Lohan and Christina Aguilera, to name just two – looking uncannily younger than ever.
The Daily Mail, never one to miss a trend, published a breathless piece detailing the combined price of the surgical interventions that may or may not be behind these A-list facial rejuvenations.
On TikTok, content creators racked up hundreds of thousands of views by asking people to guess their age, with unflatteringly brutal results (one 30-year-old woman was told she was 50 due to the “lumps and lines” in her chin).
Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan became something of a lightning rod for age-related hysteria – the 37-year-old is routinely praised online for looking younger and has said she finds it “really funny” more than anything else.
The questions kept piling up: What should a 30-something look like? Why are millennials ageing slower? Should teens be using retinol? Why does Gen Z believe it’s ageing like milk? It’s enough to make you long for the bad old days of the noughties, when all women had to worry about was being called a fat cow by Trinny and Susannah.
I have some skin in this game – as someone who just turned 36, I still remember being burned by the noughties “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” era. In my first job at a fashion magazine, I got used to colleagues saying that a celebrity was too “big” to be on the cover.
Then came the body positivity movement, in which women were instructed to love themselves as an act of self-empowerment – a term whose original meaning has now flexed beyond all recognition. I’ve watched as cosmetic interventions like Botox and fillers – once marketed to women in their fifties and beyond – are reframed as a form of self-care and sold to those who are significantly younger.
I’ve had friends I’ve known since we were teenagers, some of whom have opted for tweakments like Botox. But I’ll let you in on a secret: none of this work made me see them differently or think they looked better than before.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. It’s just that they didn’t change how I perceive them. I’m not saying that to be holier than thou – I’m a deeply shallow person who enjoys looking at beautiful scenery and people just as much as the next Libra – but there’s something I recognise in my closest pals that goes beyond their face.
Call it an essence or a soul, if you, like me, are occasionally inclined towards woo. It’s why I still know who they are even if they’re having a bad day or have suffered a dramatic haircut. They’re still them. Plus, when I look at photos of when we met, we look like we’ve just been yanked out of the womb – who wants to go back to looking that naïve?
In a post-fillers age of Ozempic, women aren’t just expected to look younger and thinner – we’re supposed to look better than we actually did at 21. But I’d like my face to be a record of my significantly more mature anxieties, thank you very much.
I’ve worked hard to look this nervous about the future – I’d like the record to show that these eyebags were from looking up my pension pot at 1am.
What are we really trying to achieve by turning back the clock? It seems we want to combine the wisdom and success of our later years with the youth of our past – it’s just not possible.
All I know is that I’d rather be worried about something – anything – other than my face. After all, I’ll have to live with it for the rest of my life.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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