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For as long as I can remember and, indeed, as far back as the history books go, beauty has been part and parcel of life for every woman. Beautiful is the ideal and the pursuit of said beauty an occupation which pervades every single aspect of a woman’s life, from staying slim to looking youthful, to having a skincare routine and making an effort every, single, day. Women have always been allocated the role of pleasing and adorning – it’s just that now it’s one small part of the exhausting goal that is having it all. Conveniently there is a multi-billion dollar industry built around each and every one of our insecurities – some of which you won’t have even realised you had until it is pointed out to you on a large billboard or unsolicited Instagram ad.

There is nothing like midlife to make a gal militant. It’s a time when we start sinking our teeth into the deeper, harder conversations. However, there are so few real and challenging discussions being had about beauty culture at the moment that I’m starting to despair.

Apart from a couple of rogue challengers to the beauty culture norm (check out the excellent Jessica DeFino), the problematic narrative around women’s beauty remains largely ignored – something which that aforementioned billion-dollar industry has a lot to do with. The beauty industry stands unchecked, inadvertently lending importance to products, routines and procedures which are invading many women’s spare time, wallets and psyche.

We really, really need to talk about beauty...

We are all grown-ups here, so I don’t feel it necessary to be at pains to point out the fact that I know that putting on some make-up or buying a beautiful new moisturiser or having a facial are not bad things. These can all feel truly wonderful and bring genuine pleasure and joy to women and that is fantastic. I feel, as a woman in midlife, that our generation (I’m talking about Generation Xers here; those born before 1982) have a purer, freer relationship with beauty which allows us to enjoy make-up and skincare in a less obsessive, less reliant way than women who are currently in their 20s and 30s.

The matriarchy most of us grew up under gave little time towards beauty stuff and – apart from those gorgeous, glossy teen magazines most of us loved – we were largely out of the way of advertising channels in a way that younger generations are not. While we have seen improvements in our attitudes to body shape, time and money invested in beauty routines and procedures remain largely uncommented upon, and the pervasion of online, so-called beauty experts who use filters and plastic surgery to portray the unachievable should be a warning sign that this industry is out of control.

Motherhood nudged my attitudes forward somewhat, as somewhere deep within me screams whenever I see my daughters exhibiting signs that they are already being influenced by beauty culture.
They are aged six and three.

In spite of my near-cessation of putting make-up on in their presence and ensuring their father is the one who primarily paints their nails (let’s get men shouldering the burden of beauty) they still love being ‘stylish’, wearing lipstick and dressing up. You might say I’m being over the top – their births have been the single biggest factor in my critiquing of beauty culture – but one of the pros of having children in your late 30s/early 40s is the no-nonsense, wry eye you bring to their upbringing.

Suddenly, my ‘you go girl’ support of girlfriends getting ‘non-invasive’ (although if it involves a needle, isn’t it invasive folks?) beauty procedures became an abomination on behalf of future generations. I recently spoke to a friend whose 20-something niece has been having fillers for some time and now wants some other, more-intrusive procedure because… let’s be honest, she’s chronically self-conscious and vulnerable. Weren’t most of us when we were in our 20s? Back then a new mascara or some lipliner might have helped to perk us up – now it’s a procedure. The whole thing is getting more sinister and when my daughter comes to me wanting fillers or whatever will be on-trend when she comes of age, my heart will officially crack because it will be too late to start the conversation we all need to be having right now.

And those conversations are so good! From my own, it would appear that many of us skip over the beauty section of magazines. A lot of women I know are generally disinterested in beauty because – news flash! – outside of the spa and the glossy magazines, it’s actually quite tedious. Yet it’s something the majority of us buy into in some way, with our hard-earned money, beaten down by the idea that we can all have ‘perfect’ skin (breakouts, scars, rosacea – can we not normalise these please?) if we just buy X product or that it will make us feel ‘better’ or improve us in some meaningful way. A friend of mine only recently realised that a sense of failure she experienced having not adhered to a ‘simple’ beauty routine (which involved the obligatory financial investment in beauty products, compounding her shame) was more harmful than any ad-hoc breakout she might experience.

If midlife is a time when we wake up to some of the lies society has thrown at us all our lives, should we not be sharing this with younger generations and spreading the word?

It was the face tools that finally, truly, broke me (although fake tan brought me close). Wonderful for your jawline, apparently, a miracle for eradicating puffiness. Up until this point it had never occurred to me that my jawline could be in some way flawed or that puffiness was a particularly bad thing – I mean, isn’t a kind of shiny puffiness the look that injectables strive to deliver? I couldn’t ignore the blatant self-soothing effect of the tool in a time when anxiety levels were at an all-time high. This insidious blending of beauty with self-care is doing none of us any favours – and by us, I mean women. Because men are fancy-free of the shackles of beauty – as my aunt would say; “Throw on a jacket and a man is ready for any event”. The money men don’t have to spend on beauty can be invested in their pension funds, and their time put into lolling around if they wish, making this all seem even more unjust; this burden of beauty, which has gone from being a woman’s hobby to a women’s issue.

Since this epiphany of sorts, my thoughts around beauty have been gaining momentum. I cannot tolerate the term anti-ageing. Should it not be banned?

Anti-ageing is anti-life and if your advertisement mentions it, I will report it. I no longer believe in miracle products, or retinol or the power of exfoliating. What I do believe is that true beauty comes from within.

We talk a lot about being kind – can we not begin the process of being kinder to ourselves and our wrinkles and our so-called “imperfections”? A truthful and conscious conversation around beauty would serve the younger generations coming up as well as ourselves, yes. But at the risk of appearing a little overly zealous, I believe it would serve humanity. Because if the beauty industry was reduced to what it should be – an indulgence, a gorgeous diversion, a now-and-again treat which made us feel pampered and put a pep in our step, we might all start to actually believe that we are already, probably, beautiful as we are.