"Get bangs or get Botox, girl"

Before we begin, I wanted to offer a content warning that today I’ll be discussing issues related to our culture’s beauty standards, aging, cosmetic procedures, and adjacent topics in an old-fashioned blog style, so if that is upsetting for you in anyway, please feel free to sit this one out, okay? Please take care of you. - S.

Hi friends,

More than a year ago, I wrote a bit about getting older in an essay here called Living Leaves A Mark.

Honestly, you may want to read that essay first before continuing with this one since a lot of my baseline setting of how I am engaging in these thoughts are already there. The most important thing to remember from that particular post is this:

So, assuming you’ve read that, yes, I find I’m still sorting through a million thoughts on this topic of getting older in our actual bodies and I wish more people in a similar stage were talking about it. Hence: today’s rough draft of a post.

Because this is a truly insane moment in history and it feels bonkers to me that, while we are living in the midst of climate change, the rise of fascism, the upending of world orders, the clawing back of progress, major violence, and so much more, we are also demanding that women spend more time and money managing their FACES.

Like, yes, diet culture was very bad and damaging in the 80s and 90s, so please enjoy this fancy, medically-updated version of it with more scrutiny over your face as you get older! Did we mention how brave Sarah Jessica Parker is to have her real face on?

I am in no way qualified to talk about any of this except for the fact that I am living through it in real-time, too.

Case in point

I posted a little update of my grey-blending hair experience on Instagram Stories over the weekend - because I love it! and sometimes it’s nice to just be a person on social media and talk about normal things, you know? - but due to the responses to the picture, it turned into a few more slides on how I’m thinking about aging right now and well, I am still reading through the hundreds and hundreds of messages that poured into my inboxes from women my age.