The new beauty standard is worse than ‘rewinding the clock’ – it’s having no age at all

Lately, consuming the celebrity content my algorithm knows I cannot walk past, I feel a creeping sense of dread. Cosmetic interventions are, according to TikTok arbiters of upcoming beauty trends, entering what’s been christened “the undetectable era”. Demi Moore, Cher and Lindsay Lohan – all once poster-girls for highly detectable work – now sport much more recognisably human faces, still perfectly plump and unlined, but erased of the Uncanny Valley effect created by over-zealous deployment of fillers, toxins, and scalpels.

This is terrible news for any woman over 40 who has ever caught a glimpse of her reflection in the car window, and thought “I don’t love what’s happening here, but I’m going to dedicate my spare time to reading an anthology of Rilke poetry instead of researching how to transfer fat from my arse to my face.”

Elle Macpherson, 61, Cher, 78, and Demi Moore, 62 all look extemely good for their age. Credit:

In just the same way, Ozempic has obliterated, almost overnight, the hard-won gains of the body positivity movement. No one needs to learn to be comfortable in a bigger body now that a relatively simple solution to the bigger body is on offer.

As I’ve always understood it, there’s a price to pay for both ageing naturally and submitting to cosmetic modifications. Ageing naturally requires significant reserves of stoicism, as your face – once a smooth, clear expanse of undeveloped pastures – is carved up into a densely lined urban map.

Going the route of needles, fillers and surgeries, on the other hand, ensures each new line is no more than a temporary irritation-crude graffiti on the walls of the Parthenon. It also means wearing a face that bears the unmistakable evidence of tampering: Botox and fillers have produced a slew of women who look like they were conceived using the same batch of donor sperm. If you’ve ever watched a Real Housewife unleash a molten torrent of invective at a fellow cast mate while her face remains a frozen, immutable mask, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

My choice to age naturally – not so much a choice, but a slow-dawning awareness that I’d chosen this path – was primarily due to my aesthetic beef with the Kardashifaction of faces, coupled with financial constraints and a prickly resentment at the idea that I should be ashamed of my own waning adorableness, and throw every available resource at maintaining it. Of course, this doesn’t preclude me from engaging in a few minutes of light negging in front of the bathroom mirror most mornings – a sort of mindfulness exercise for the self-deprecating – during which I dolefully note the deepening valleys of my nasolabial folds, the overnight appearance of a new cluster of crow’s feet, and a certain dulling of the complexion, like the contents of an ashtray blew across my face while I slept.

As I swamp my face with snail mucin (called mucin to persuade you that it’s not mucus, which it is), I remind myself why I have chosen not to try to halt the ageing process. At least my face is able to register consternation at its own reflection, I tell myself. You don’t like it when you can’t tell what people are really thinking because of the Botox. Remember? I whisper, as I white-knuckle the lid off my Vitamin C serum.

The decision to age naturally was easy when the alternative was to look like the 6th Kardashian sister: I was principled and defiant in the face of ludicrous beauty standards and would age like Brigitte Bardot: dramatically, unapologetically, and with a clowder of cats at my feet.

But I’m not sure I can maintain this stance if I just look a bit worse than everyone else. The centre is not holding, to quote Joan Didion, who, it’s safe to assume, was not thinking of facial rejuvenation when she wrote those words. If anti-ageing interventions no longer make people look unnervingly alien, but simply hotter and younger, I will no longer pass as confident and elegant in my lined, worn face. I’m just going to look a bit rubbish, a crumpled facsimile of a more carefully maintained woman of the same age. And as the interventions become more subtle, more tasteful, harder to discern, the expectation that women stay fresh-faced forever, discreetly dedicating ourselves to the work of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cosmetic upkeep, ratchets up once more. It’s a lot harder to say no to the Natural Glow filter version of yourself than the Pillow Face version.

Maybe I was telling myself convenient little lies all along; maybe “ageing naturally” was always less about self-acceptance, and more about rejecting a gauche aesthetic. The undetectable era forces me to think about my face again, forces all women to pause yet again and decide which path to take.

Does the undetectable era signal the end of aged faces, in the same way Ozempic seems to be signalling the end of big bodies? Will there never be a time when women can just shut it all down, and devote their remaining time on earth to looking up, and around, instead of in the mirror?

I don’t want to un-learn how to be comfortable with my appearance.

So this is my plea to the industry wizards and sorceresses who wield the scalpels, point the lasers, and administer the injectables: don’t mess with the status quo. Let the unnatural, natural order of things remain in place – long reign the frozen foreheads, distended pouts, and chipmunk-cheeks that made it that much easier to go intervention-free into middle age. And while I await your response, I’ll cling gratefully to the knowledge that the mysterious, ephemeral appeal of youth – the hard to pin-down quality that makes everyone under 25 gorgeous and has little to do with wrinkles and lines – remains beyond the reach of cosmetic science.

Bunny Banyai is a freelance writer and author.

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