Losing face

IT'S probably the angle. It couldn't be that bad. But there's a faint whiff of Bride of Wildenstein about it.

IT'S probably the angle. It couldn't be that bad. But there's a faint whiff of Bride of Wildenstein about it.

A few more sessions with the needle and the look could harden, homogenise, and you'll start to look like all those other - insecure - women.

No Kylie, no, please not you. Please tell me it's just an unflattering shot, a trick of the light and the angle. But there's been feverish press speculation; you've admitted Botox usage in the past but not this time. I've always thought of you as impenetrable, magnificently, in terms of your media image. So tightly in control, spilling so little in interviews; the masterful game you've played. But perhaps with these latest pap shots we have a chink in the armour, and it's not revealing something good. It's revealing fear. Oh babes.

Our celeb-obsessed world greedily gulps up signs of slippage in a successful woman. We all stare, fascinated and appalled, at a beautiful face desecrated. But it makes me angry. At the men who impose their will upon it - because yes, it's usually men wielding the scalpel and needle - and angry at us for allowing it. I'm just as horrified seeing women tottering in those ridiculously vertiginous McQueen heels from a few years back, tumbling and falling on catwalks. Horrified to see Hussein Chalayan ugly-fying women in the name of fashion. Give me the female designers any day - Phoebe Philo, Marni's Consuelo Castiglioni, McQueen's successor, Sarah Burton, Jil Sander and our own Collette Dinnigan. They don't try to make us look ridiculous, don't try to stamp their misogyny upon us; they empower us with beauty and practicality and a flattering cut.

Would a female cosmetic practitioner see Kylie's famously pretty face, or Melanie Griffith's, or Meg Ryan's, and think, let me change this? Would they have the audacity? Can I apply my simple rule of equality here - are women doing this to men? There are some iconic females you never expect to succumb: Tilda Swinton. Cate Blanchett. Joan Didion. Julianne Moore. Quentin Bryce. Strong women all, with a compelling confidence. There's something comforting about finally owning your looks, accepting who you are; something courageous and cool about baring, honestly, the rich tapestry of your life through your face. I know a few older women with an intriguing serenity and strength and they all have one thing in common: they're doing exactly what they want to be doing in life.

It's the serenity of being in control. The glow of it. And it comes from within.

The chap inquired not too long ago, "Is that blue pen on your leg?" Er, no, that would be a varicose vein. He shrugged, didn't care. It's life. We're in it together and I love him for that shrug. Then there's the bosom - horrors! - turning into an old-lady shelf before my eyes, terrifyingly horizontal. But I'm comforted that the signs of slippage - thickening body, crepey upper lip, creased forehead - are something that mates are experiencing too. "One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them," Virginia Woolf wrote.

We don't get any sense of fellowship when we look at Melanie's face now, or Madonna's. It feels competitive, isolating, sad. That they're prisoners in their bodies, their esteem held hostage by the imperfections we all have as we age. It feels like the tipping point, when a celeb loses their currency. We want our older women to look strong and sexy and confident because they've got hard-earned wisdom and wit and wrinkles and a voice, finally. What younger women don't want blazing in an older woman's (unnaturally altered) face is fear.

A sheepdog willingness to please the blokes. Terror over ageing. Over death. Over the dewy-skinned young thing next to them. We're better than that, girls. It shouts to the world that you're scrabbling when you should be sailing in a sea of serenity and knowing. Kylie, you're not meant to be a scrabbler.

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