The face you've been performing into a mirror for forty years is the costume. The face underneath is what people find magnetic—and you only meet her when you stop checking shop windows
I want to write about my mother's friend G, who is in her late sixties, and who is, by some distance, the most striking-looking older woman I know.
I want to be careful in how I describe this, because describing women's appearances in writing is a small minefield, and I don't want to wander into it carelessly. Let me try to be precise.
G is not conventionally beautiful in the way the magazines define it. She has not had work done. She has not, as far as I can tell, spent much money on skincare. Her clothes are nice but unremarkable. She does not appear to have any particular routine that would explain her appearance. By the metrics that beauty is usually measured by, there is no obvious reason she should look the way she looks.
And yet, in any room she enters, your eye goes to her. Not in the slightly pitying way one's eye sometimes goes to older women who have spent considerable effort attempting to look younger. The other way. The way one's eye goes to someone who is fully, calmly, entirely there. She is, in the most accurate use of the word, magnetic. People want to talk to her at parties. Younger women, in particular, gravitate toward her. She has the kind of face you find yourself looking at across a room without quite knowing why.
I asked my mother about her, once, a few years ago. I asked her what she thought G's secret was. My mother, who has known G for forty-something years, thought about it for a moment, and then said something I haven't been able to forget.
She said, "G stopped pretending around fifty-five. That's it. That's the whole thing."
What stopping looked like
I want to describe what my mother meant by that, because I had to ask follow-up questions to fully understand it, and the follow-up questions changed how I look at older women generally.
What G had stopped doing, around the age of fifty-five, was performing for the imagined glance of strangers. She had stopped, in any active sense, calibrating her appearance for an audience that wasn't actually in the room. She had stopped checking herself in shop windows. She had stopped, when she walked into a place, scanning to see who was looking and adjusting her face accordingly. She had stopped, when she sat down on the train, arranging her body for the half-attention of nearby passengers. She had stopped, in essence, the small ongoing performance that most women of her generation had been running, more or less constantly, since they were about thirteen.
The performance, as my mother described it, was not vanity in any obvious sense. It was something deeper and more automatic. It was the running awareness that one was, at any given moment, being potentially observed by strangers, and the minute calibration of one's face and posture and tone to be, at all times, presentable to that imagined gaze.
This performance, my mother said, takes an enormous amount of energy. The energy is invisible because the performance is unconscious, but the energy is real. It is the energy of being, every single day, slightly on. Slightly tense in the small muscles of the face. Slightly aware of how one is sitting. Slightly attuned to the imagined assessment of an imagined observer.
G had, somewhere in her mid-fifties, simply stopped doing this. The stopping had not been a conscious decision. It had been, my mother thought, more like a slow draining away. The performance had become, by some point, more tiring than valuable, and G had, almost without noticing, allowed it to lapse.
What had emerged, in its place, was the face she has now. The face that people in rooms find themselves looking at. The face that is, by my mother's account and my own observation, considerably more striking than the carefully maintained one that had preceded it.
Why the face changes
I want to think about why this happens, because the mechanism is interesting, and because I don't think it's something we have very good language for.
A face that has been performed into a mirror for forty years has, by structural necessity, accumulated a particular set of habitual micro-expressions. The slight smile-readiness. The small softening when looked at. The careful neutrality of a face that knows it is potentially being assessed. The face has been, in essence, in costume, for so long that the costume has become almost indistinguishable from the face itself.
The costume is not entirely cosmetic. The costume is held by tiny muscles. The tiny muscles, after decades of holding the same configuration, become tense in particular ways. The tension produces a face that is, in a hard-to-articulate way, slightly less alive than it could be. The face is performing aliveness rather than simply being alive. The performance is convincing, mostly. It is also, on close examination, a performance.
When the performance stops, the muscles slowly let go. The face, for the first time in decades, is allowed to settle into whatever it actually wants to do when it is not being observed. The settling is not, in any obvious sense, a beautification. The face does not become smoother or more youthful. What it becomes is more present. More inhabited. More clearly the face of a specific person who is in a specific room having a specific experience, rather than the face of a person who is, at all times, slightly available for assessment.
This is the thing that produces the magnetic quality I see in G. She is not pretending. She is not, when she walks into a room, available for the imagined glance. She is just there. The thereness, after years of performed thereness, is striking in a way that is difficult to describe but easy to recognize when you see it.
The other woman I want to mention
I want to describe a counter-example briefly, because I think the contrast is useful.
My aunt, my father's older sister, is the same age as G, more or less. She is, by every conventional measure, more concerned with her appearance than G is. She has the better skincare. She has the better clothes. She spends, as far as I can tell, considerably more money and attention on how she looks.
And she is, in a way that I find a bit sad, less striking than G. Not because she's less attractive in any technical sense, but because the performance is still running. You can see, when you look at my aunt, the small ongoing calibration. The face is still being held in a particular configuration. The energy of being maintained is still being expended. The result is a woman who looks, in any given moment, slightly tense in a way that has nothing to do with whatever is actually happening in the room.
I have, over the years, watched my aunt and G in the same rooms. The eye, almost without exception, goes to G. My aunt is, by any objective measurement, putting in more effort. The effort is, paradoxically, what's costing her. The effort is what's keeping her face in a particular held configuration that, to anyone looking at it, reads as not-quite-present. G's face, which is putting in considerably less effort, reads as present. The presence is the thing.
I want to be careful not to make this sound like a verdict on my aunt, because I love her, and I don't think she's done anything wrong. She's running the protocol she was given. The protocol says that older women maintain themselves. The protocol says that the alternative is "letting yourself go," which is, in the protocol's vocabulary, a kind of moral failure. My aunt is not letting herself go. She is, by the standards of her generation, doing it right.
The thing she hasn't quite figured out, that G has, is that doing it right is not what produces the striking older woman. The striking older woman is the one who has stopped doing it altogether. The maintenance and the striking are, in some real way, opposed. The maintenance is what keeps the face slightly held, slightly performed, slightly unavailable to the room. The stopping of the maintenance is what lets the face become, at last, the face of an actual specific person.
Why this is so hard for women to do
I want to acknowledge, because I'd be writing dishonestly if I didn't, that what I'm describing is much harder for women than I'm probably making it sound.
Women of G's generation were trained, from a very young age, in the imagined-glance protocol. They were trained that the imagined glance was a kind of moral oversight. They were trained that being unobserved was, in some sense, dangerous. The training was so thorough that, for most women, stopping the performance would feel like stopping breathing. The performance is the breathing.
What G managed to do, somehow, in her mid-fifties, was to stop the performance without falling into the cultural alternative, which is the visible bitter retreat from being looked at at all. She didn't become invisible. She didn't, as my mother put it, "give up." She just stopped performing. The stopping is a third option, and it's a much harder one to identify than either the continuing or the giving up.
The continuing is the conventional path. The giving up is the visible cultural failure. The third option, the simple cessation of the performance without any compensating bitterness, is the path that produces the striking older woman, and almost no one talks about it as a path because almost no one has language for it. We call the women who do it "ageing well," and we assume they have some product or routine. They don't. They have, in most cases, simply stopped.
What I'd say to anyone reading this
I want to be careful here, because I'm a thirty-eight-year-old man writing about something that does not, in the same way, apply to me. The imagined-glance protocol is not, for men, what it is for women. I have not lived inside the same training. My observations are from the outside.
What I can say, from the outside, is that the older women I find most striking are, almost without exception, the ones who have stopped performing. Not the ones who have invested heavily in maintenance. Not the ones who have had work done. The ones who have, by some private route, allowed the performance to lapse, and let the face beneath it be the face that's in the room.
If you are a woman approaching this stage of your life, you may already be feeling the small fatigue of forty years of performance. The fatigue is real. The fatigue is also, I want to suggest, a piece of useful information. The fatigue is telling you that the performance is costing more than it's producing. The fatigue is, in some real way, an invitation to stop.
The stopping does not have to be dramatic. It does not have to be a public renunciation. It can just be, in small private ways, the gradual cessation of the imagined glance. The decision to walk past the shop window without checking. The decision to sit on the train without arranging. The decision to be, for one afternoon, in your own face without performing it for anyone.
The face you have when you are not performing is, almost certainly, more striking than the face you have been performing into mirrors for decades. You will not believe this. The protocol has trained you not to believe it. The mirror, which has been the audience for the performance, has reinforced the belief that the performance is the face. It isn't. The performance is the costume. The face is underneath.
G, the last time I saw her, was at a small dinner at my parents' house. She was not wearing anything special. She was not, that I could see, doing anything particular with her hair. She was sitting at the table, laughing at something my father had said, and the room around her was, in a way I have only ever observed in women who have stopped performing, slightly arranged around her without anyone having intended to arrange it that way.
That, I now believe, is what it looks like when the costume comes off. It does not look like surrender. It looks like the most powerful version of a person finally, after decades of being held in costume, becoming visible in a room.
It is, by any honest measurement, beautiful. The beauty is not, however, what the magazines have been selling. The beauty is something the magazines could not sell, because what is being sold is the absence of the very thing the magazines are in the business of selling.
The face is yours. It always was. The only thing required to find it is to stop performing the other one.
