Face Aging?

Hi friend,

Social media and the internet have made life, and parenting, more complicated (in our opinion). In the absence of legislation that truly protects children, parents are left to figure out the rules and policing of devices alone. And yet, this technology is inescapably woven into our lives.

We’re almost 20 years into a massive iPhone-based social experiment, and we’re still grappling with how to navigate it. As Pete Davidson poetically remarked, “We’re not supposed to see everyone’s shit all day…Like, I know exactly what Mark Wahlberg is doing all day. I don’t need to know that. That’s not a slam at him, it’s just an example.” Agreed!

For parents, concerns over digital sharing and privacy start much earlier than that moment when, suddenly, all your kids’ friends have cell phones except for them. As Amanda Hess lays out in her soon-to-be-released book, Second Life (Amazon, Bookshop), a smartphone provided both fear and solace during her pregnancy, particularly after finding out her child would be born with a rare genetic condition.

The thing that’s so great about this book – aside from the writing, and how smart she is – is Hess’s generosity and empathy for other parents, and her honesty about her digital habits. Particularly the embarrassing stuff, which she examines and critiques. It’s refreshing.

These conversations about kids, parenting, and screens – we’re all having them. No one has the perfect solution. We see people who’ve been burned by the fires of internet commentary discussing it, as well as people who are newer to the game, with younger children.

Maybe we are overthinking these things, and perhaps other people are underthinking them. (That’s actually just a reminder to ourselves to be less upset when another parent posts photos of our kids to their public Facebook account.) Not everyone has spent the past 20 or so years working on and writing for the internet, after all. 

Speaking of being less upset about things, this week’s essay is about how one woman is wrestling with the way she feels about her face looking older. Again, this is very relatable. Wouldn’t we all love to be above that sort of thing? And yet…

Read on for that, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

Remember the iconic scene in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil where Katherine Helmond has her face stretched out? That’s what I used to think of when I heard the phrase “getting work done.” Clearly, I thought, nobody I know would ever do that. 

And yet here we are, decades later, and the things I have done for beauty include veganism, and also its opposite (red meat and bone broth for collagen); sunscreen and Vitamin C serum; monthly facials; Gua Shua (if you know, you know; I keep mine in the freezer); microcurrent devices; eye masks; Korean sheet masks (my husband brought several home from a South Korean writer’s retreat); expensive products as well as drugstore products and mail-order products; food as a beauty product (raw honey, slightly cooled green tea bags as eye masks, not at the same time); face yoga; facial acupuncture (I loved it, but it’s prohibitively expensive); and most recently a visit to Face Gym for a “workout” that boiled down to a face massage and electro-stim (this was a third of the cost of facial acupuncture). 

The things I say I won’t do, but spend a great deal of time reading about on Reddit forums, include neurotoxins, lasers, injectables, and face tape (like Frownies). I am intoxicated by the idea of micro-needling (with or without plasma because, see facial acupuncture above). Time and budget pull me back from the edge again and again.

None of these things occurred to me in my 20s or 30s. I assumed I'd age naturally and appreciate myself despite a little cellulite. I had no idea what it would feel like to turn 50 and watch my face begin to “fall.” I’m being dramatic here, I don’t think it’s actually fallen, at least God I hope not, but I notice things I didn’t used to notice. And I care more than I imagined I’d care. 

My mother was beautiful, until she wasn’t. But age didn’t steal my mother’s beauty; illness and a bad marriage did that. At 40, she was luminous and dressed in Versace. At 50, she struggled. And at 65, she died. Had she been free of diabetes and its complications – and a shitty husband and his complications? Had she been allowed to age naturally? Well, who knows. 

My grandmother, on the other hand, lived to 100 and had great skin. She did very little to take care of it. While my aunt swears that Grandma Ida was a frequent visitor to the Neiman Marcus cosmetics department, I remember her telling me that Oil of Olay was her secret. Apart from that, she didn’t do facials, she didn’t do Botox, and she never got anything “lifted.” She ate red meat, drank coffee every day — no alcohol, she just didn’t like it — and never smoked. Her sole concession to anti-aging was hair; she got it dyed at a salon until roughly the last month of her life. She also worked well into her 90s selling real estate. I think of my grandmother’s beauty as emanating from her innate strength. Ida was a woman who knew how to get things done. 

When I was younger, beauty eluded me. Unlike my cute blonde mother, I was awkward and artsy. I spent my 20s hiding in oversized clothes, pursuing unrequited crushes, writing in my journal, and standing behind more conventionally attractive friends. I began to feel beautiful in my 30s when my work as a playwright started gaining traction and getting produced. I imagined that, like my grandma, if beauty came from independence and creative power, it would never leave me.  

But lately, I wonder. At night, I fixate on under-eye bags and jowls. I'm addicted to Vitamin C serum. I obsess over eye cream even though my dermatologist insists nobody needs it. There are the aforementioned micro-needling fantasies. I hydrate like nobody’s business. 

In the US, approximately 2.84 billion dollars was spent on Botox in 2022, and 3.6 billion on hyaluronic acid fillers. Last year, multiple news outlets ran pieces on the popularity of injectables for Gen Z as “preventative” skincare. Today’s young people treat these things as normal. I often think of Cynthia Nixon’s line in Sex and the City: “Are we doing this now?” 

I am the filmmaker behind a movie about a middle-aged single mom making room for herself (Ramona at Midlife, currently streaming) and I have been outspoken about the fact that neither I nor the actress I wrote the lead role for have ever “had any work done” — that is, of course, unless you count the very long list above, which did at times feel like work. 

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TO STREAM All four seasons of the Italian YA drama The Sea Beyond (about teens locked up in a youth detention center in Naples) are finally available to US audiences thanks to a new Netflix deal. The show has been a major hit overseas, so we’re excited to watch and see what all the fuss is about.

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TO LISTEN One song off Cut Copy’s album breakout album, In Ghost Colors, is enough to transport you back to the summer of 2008. It was so bouncy and optimistic. This week, the synth-pop band just released two new songs, “Solid” and “A Decade Long Sunset.” Their mood’s shifted towards melancholy, but the music’s still great.

TO WATCH In the artsy new period piece On Swift Horses (in theaters), Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi play characters trying to fit into typical ‘50s gender roles while carrying on secret queer love affairs. It looks very beautiful and longing-filled.

The brand finding success with “cool-mom” basics. • A good use for an old Sears. • Vogue’s angling for the exclusive on the Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez wedding. • Gen Z, the gullible generation. • “Wear all the low-rise jeans you want, but let’s never go back to the fratboyification of mainstream culture in the aughts and 2010s.”

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