What if nothing needs to be done?

I watched a 60 Minutes story recently about cosmetic surgery and medical tourism gone badly wrong. It disturbed me, partly because the consequences were awful, but also because, uncomfortably, I could see how someone gets there. You notice something you don’t love, discover it can be “fixed”, and think perhaps you could just do this one thing.

I’m not writing this from some morally superior hilltop, moisturised only in olive oil and self-acceptance. I’m flying to Bali soon to accompany a girlfriend while she has a relatively small cosmetic procedure - I’m going along as moral support. I’ve also braved Botox myself. It’s given me some good results, and it also gave me a frightening (thankfully temporary) palsy-like effect, the kind of thing that recalibrates one’s relationship with a needle fairly quickly. I think I’ve reached the end of what it can usefully do for me.

Surgery might do more, but surgery is surgery, and that program was a brutal reminder that the risk side of the equation is real. Which leaves another option the beauty industry isn’t especially good at selling: I just look my age.

That’s a surprisingly hard sentence to write, because I like looking good. Some mornings I look in the mirror and miss a face I used to have. But when I go through old photographs, I’m not sure which face that is.

There I am at 21, with enormous 1980s hair and shoulders seemingly wide enough to land a light aircraft on. A few years on, hauling fish onto a boat, not thinking about my face at all. Then dressed up and out for the night, probably worrying about some physical imperfection I’d now regard as entirely imaginary. And here I am now: no makeup, no hair styling, an entirely ordinary Saturday at home.

Lined up, those photographs could pass for a decline. Mostly they’re a record of a life. The woman in those early photographs hadn’t yet loved all the people I’ve loved, or built up the friendships, mistakes, grief and ridiculous decisions that now make up my life. She looked younger because she was younger. At some point that became an aesthetic failure rather than just what happens.

We tell women to “age gracefully”, which sounds admirable until you think about what it’s actually asking. Apparently, we may age, provided we don’t look terribly enthusiastic about it. Don’t get fat, but don’t get thin in the wrong places either. Don’t wrinkle too much or let your neck give the game away. Keep your hair thick, your jawline sharp, your brows somewhere near their original postcode, and for heaven’s sake do something about your collagen.

In other words: age. Just don’t look aged.

That’s a fairly spectacular piece of cultural nonsense, and it creates an impossible finish line, because what the beauty industry is really selling is the idea you can go back. Fix the eyes and suddenly the jawline is letting the team down. Then the neck. Then the hands. Then someone on Instagram introduces you to an anatomical defect you didn’t know you had. There’s always another five years to chase. At 40 you want to look 35. At 50, 45 starts looking pretty good. I’d rather not spend the next twenty years missing the face I had five years earlier.

I haven’t stopped caring about how I look. I exercise because I want a strong body, I colour my hair, and I’m not surrendering my tweezers in the name of feminist solidarity. The bit I’m still working out is where looking after myself tips over into trying to correct myself.

It all gets a bit absurd when I catch myself studying my own profile from an angle no other human being would ever naturally encounter. The people who love me aren’t running the same audit. My husband doesn’t love the woman from an old photograph more because her skin was tighter, and my friends aren’t maintaining relationships with my cheekbones. They know my laugh, my opinions, my annoying habits, and the food I cook.

And I don’t want to go backwards. I wouldn’t trade what I know now, or the people in my life now, for tighter skin.

I don’t know that I’ll never have Botox again. I’m too inconsistent for that sort of grand declaration. And when I’m sitting beside my friend in Bali, I’ll mean it when I tell her she looks wonderful. She’ll no doubt be thrilled about it, and I’ll be thrilled for her. But for myself, I’ve started asking a different question: what if nothing needs to be done?

I still don’t love every reflection. There will still be mornings when I pull my face back in the bathroom mirror and think, well, that’s better. But most days, what I actually do about it is cook something decent, get on with the day and hope that whatever this face looks like at 70, the body attached to it is still working properly.

There’s a woman in my old photographs I remember fondly. She’s also, technically, still smiling out of the headshot on my website. It’s eight years old.

Make of that what you will.