Cosmetics

You’re in a café looking at a woman with a thick mane of lustrous, golden hair atop a trim torso. 

In fact, from the back she looks a lot like Barbie.  Then she turns to reveal a face that looks a lot like Barbie too – but at 70, or perhaps when she’s been left in the bottom of the paddling pool for a month, dried in the microwave and then cleaned with steelo. 

You have now experienced lock shock.

Continue reading "Clinging to youth by a single strand of hair" »

If one’s face can’t register an orgasm, is the climax still as good?

Startling as it may seem, I feel liberated by the decay of beauty.  It’s a bold statement, but in this era, when the glorification of all that is youthful is paramount, I hope that I look like the mother of my eldest daughter, (who for the record is almost 24,) and not at all like her sister. I don’t want to be in competition with her, or my younger girl, who is only eight. I want them to take up the mantle of their own prime years and have me cheering them on from the proper place - as the more senior female of the clan.

Our society so abhors the discussion of ageing and death, that we have embraced a whole new industry of psychological touchstones involving chemicals and knives and a race to look 10 years younger in 10 days. I don’t castigate or object to anyone making personal choices regarding cosmetic procedures, nor do I rule them out for myself if I feel I want them. But I am concerned that so many of my friends, acquaintances and even other people in the media are beginning to relinquish their unique expressions of emotion and life experience at the point of a needle.

Continue reading "Cosmetic work can make you mistake chit-chat for orgasm" »