Mutton Dressed As Lamb
I’m so sick of the pressure put on me and women my age to look 20-plus years younger. It’s not enough to be chic and soignee these days, you have to be plucked, waxed, tinted, botoxed and exercised to within an inch of your life. And it’s so expensive – the last two haircuts ( just a cut and blowdry, nothing else) cost 35 pounds and 60 euro respectively. That’s a lot of money every 6 weeks, and doesn’t include all the hair products and maintenance in between. And makeup – 30 quid for a bottle of foundation that’ll last a month? I don’t think so.
I’m all for elegance and grooming (I’d love to go back to the ’30s style-wise if I could) and I love a bit of mindless self-indulgence, but bloody hell, the spectacle of grown women suckered by-marketing hype into looking like precariously trussed chickens pretending to be teeny-girl paedo-fodder is ridiculous.
I’m not the only one who feels this way:
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Glimpse yourself in the mirror or in a shop window and you might think you are your mother. You’ve got her walk, her chin, and you’re probably saving bits of leftover food in cling film on saucers in the fridge and asking for tap water at restaurants – like she does. The difference is that you’re multi-tasking in double figures, with your career as well as a family to run, while these days your mum’s out at line dancing with her mates, at creative writing, or watching Watercolour Challenge with a nice big cream cake and a glass of wine.
Letting yourself go in my mother’s day was going out without a pair of tights.
What’s different is that your mother was allowed to grow old. She had her hair set, she wore twin sets, tweed, comfy shoes and waved her fingers at people or scowled at youths who dropped litter. She ran the cakestall at the WI and people treated her with respect (people were actually a bit scared of her). She was not expected to compete with young women in the looks stakes. She was above it. It didn’t matter that she bought cashmere jumpers to last, got wrinkles, or wore half moon glasses on a useful chain round her neck, it was expected of her. It wasn’t that she ‘let herself go’ as the dreadful phrase goes, letting yourself go to my mother was not making the beds till 11am, eating in the street, or going out without a pair of tights. She wasn’t expected to compete with me, borrow my hipster jeans, fancy pants or Bay City Roller scarf. She was allowed to look like Fanny Craddock, or Margot Leadbetter ? and people gave her service at the Co-op and took her seriously.
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It’s pretty ironic that this rant, from the writer of BBC’s Grumpy Old Women, is featured on AllAboutYou.com, a website dedicated to makeup, hair and appearance and apparently funded by cosmetics company advertising.
I refuse to be suckered into spending money I can’t afford to look a way I don’t want to look. That way lies madness.
