No one likes talking to a frozen face
Just as I was becoming an adolescent and due to start worrying about my appearance, I had a stroke of luck.
My best friend Ruth’s father became manager of the Bank of Ireland. So he moved into the living quarters above the fine art-deco building in the centre of my provincial Northern Irish town.
This meant that, each day, when school ended, Ruth and I could swarm quickly back to her house and take up our position on the window seat of our eyrie in the centre of the town’s main street.
Humans never look up. And so no one realised we two were staring down from our very informative vantage point.
It was the custom at our grammar school for most pupils to head straight to the main street at the end of school each day. No one had any money to spend; the purpose was just to walk up and down the street, in a sort of passeggiata, to score social credits and debits from contemporaries: ‘He nodded at me!’ or ‘She cut me dead.’
It was a bit like people courting Instagram likes today – they did it just for reassurance, or to confirm paranoia.
Ruth and I could observe the most seemingly swaggering and confidence-filled schoolchildren regarding themselves anxiously in shop windows before taking on haughty expressions as they strode on. It was an eye-opener.
We were delighted to see the most attractive girl in the sixth form constantly ducking into doorways and pulling faces into a compact mirror, pausing before daring to resume the passeggiata.
There was one boy who was above all that – Ivan. He was such a corker – later an Irish pop star – that he showed no interest at all in his appearance as he moved purposefully along the street.
The old ladies of the town would shudder when his name was mentioned. ‘That poor fellow Ivan,’ they would lament. ‘Those looks will turn his head.’
They had a point. Ivan didn’t fancy himself but had fanciability thrust upon him – and later did become slightly conceited.
Our weeks at the window taught us one thing for certain – no one gives a damn about what anyone else looks like. What matters to them is whether others appear to admire their looks.
Even in grown-up circles today, many of us have not got the message that no one cares how we look – as long as it’s not downright off-putting. And so we embark on terrible self-sabotaging beauty treatments.
I am all for colouring your hair.
We all start to go grey at around 40, and coloured hair – except if you are Christine Lagarde – is simply nicer.
Teeth need to be kept in good condition – no bucking or wedged food pellets.
Blepharoplasty is fine if your eyelids have started to droop so much you can’t actually see out of your eyes. And if you simply can’t stop overeating because junk food has disrupted your leptin function, then by all means go on the weight- loss jabs. I am not on them myself because they seem too good to be true. Breast enhancement is all very well for the correction of ‘banana bosoms’. But you don’t want them standing out like two coconuts. One man told me he felt ‘pre-coital tristesse’ when viewing an artificial naked pair.
Steer a hugely wide berth around botox.
One girl who had it in her jaw, to stop herself grinding her teeth down to stumps, found that her smile was frozen.
‘When my mouth was closed, it looked normal,’ says Made in Chelsea ‘star’ Sophie Habboo. ‘But everyone else wondered what was going on with my smile – it lasted six months.’
Botox is often injected by barely trained therapists, leaving patients with lopsided smiles and droopy eyelids. No one enjoys a conversation with someone whose responses they cannot ‘read’.
Please don’t go for hardcore facial cleansing, where the therapist leaves you with ‘colander face’ after brutally extracting whiteheads and blackheads.
These can instead be treated with clay masks and salicylic acid toners, which leave no puncture marks.
But the young – starting in their early twenties – cannot be stopped. They are all pumping themselves full of botox and fillers (often made of salmon sperm).
I’ve just watched an American plastic surgeon on a TED Talk, lamenting this terrible trend – even though he’s making money from it. His lecture ended with a valid philosophical point:
‘If everyone looks identical to each other, people are going to have to start working on their personalities again – trying to be kinder, more interesting, more empathetic, as this will be the only way to differentiate themselves.’
As Henry James said, ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’
Mary Killen’s Oldie Beauty Day is on 25th September. See page 26 for details
