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| Theories: Age Before Beauty |
Posted by
Schizo on Tuesday, June 22, 2004 - 08:47 AM PST
How often we hear the phrases "How beautiful she must have been when she was young", "Oh no, I'm starting to look old", or even "She's so perfect, you'd never know she was 40!" People nowadays have an obsession with youth, as strong as their obsession with being underweight. Life ends at 30, unless you have the proper beauty treatments, or maybe a good plastic surgeon. Wrinkles and gray hair are a curse.
Bullshit.
People are starting to get the point about weight - you don't have to be stick-thin to be beautiful. You can see that anti-propaganda being fed us all over the media, although it is still so ingrained in us that we still long for the stick-thin bodies of supermodels. But still, our culture's standards of beauty revolve strictly around the very young. To be truly lovely, you need to look like a sixteen-year-old, or in your twenties at the most. Much time, effort, money, and often excruciating pain are spent on acheiving this.
But this is ridiculous. Let's take our media-induced blinders off for a second, and really look at these age-induced so-called blemishes.
Let's start with gray hair. I am starting to get an occasional gray hair. You don't see it, because I dye my hair, but that's not why I dye it. I am torn between my desire to be a redhead, and to have those delicate threads of pure silver running through my dark-brown hair. Ironically enough, my fascination with gray hair causes me to pluck them when I see them, if only to better admire their shine and shimmer. What is wrong with people? Gold hair is considered beautiful, but why not silver?
And wrinkles. Those delicate infintessimal lines around the corners of my eyes and mouth. I am 27, and although I still occasionally get mistaken for a high-school student by the unobservant or the flattering, my age is starting to show subtly in my skin. I love those lines, forming a filagree around my eyes, adding emphasis to my smile. Find someone you know, in their 30's or 40's, and look at those fine wrinkles, and tell me that they are not a work of natures art, time's embellishment on the smoothness of immature skin.
And that's not even taking into account older wrinkles, on those in their 70's or 80's. Skin that was once tightly molded to muscle and bone now breaks into a waterfall of draperies. No two faces drape exactly the same. The pattern of this tumbling skin displays a lifetime's collection of facial expressions. When an old woman smiles, you don't see one smile, but thousands, even millions of smiles, all shining back at you from through the years.
And this does not even include the beauty that comes just from the shining-forth of wisdom and experience. So many young people, overbrimming with typical and accepted beauty, only mar that beauty with the idiocy of their actions. But the words and actions of an elderly beauty are full of grace and appropriateness. The gentleness of their compassion, the astringant bite of wisdom, all this adds to and enhances the beauties of age.
So, don't dread aging. Revel in it. Find the loveliness in your own signs of age and in those around you. Don't let anyone kid you. The best is yet to come.
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| Age Before Beauty | Login/Create an account | 33 Comments |
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by MystryssRavynDarque (MystryssRavynHI@wmconnect.com)
on Jun 22, 2004 - 12:43 PM
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I like this article and I like the way you use yourself as an example, though I am sure this could turn into an entire book on examples of men and women who force themselves to look younger through plastic surgery, the horrors of the scalpel and botox needles, and so on.
Recently my sister told me that I was starting to get smile lines and "crows feet" wrinkles at the corners of my eyes and I am only 18. She told me to get an anti-wrinkle cream to fix them. I say that smile lines must mean I am happy and I would preferr them over frown lines any day. Wrinkles on the face, on the hands, or anywhere on the body show the turmoil or adventures one has lived through. They show strength and wisdom as well as accomplishment. I'll take my wrinkles as they come, but I will start wearing sunglasses if not only to keepy my eyes working.
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by gothicmorman (litty_klj@hotmail.com)
on Jun 22, 2004 - 07:03 PM
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personally, i think it will be great to be old when i get there, some people ask why and say that old is so gross and blah blah blah, but how many young people can sit in rocking chairs on thayr front porch and give cookies to children then take out the rifle and yell "GET OFF MY LAWN" and be socially accepted all at the same time!... well at least i think that is the epitomy of being a crazy old granny. actually i find the "16 year olds" that have 16 year old children rather frightening... growing old is a part of life, and like expressed in this article it should be celebrated just as youth is but people these days are seeking immortality, everyone wants to be the knight in shining armour or the princess in the tower. but really, if this makes any sense at all and i have not gone to far on rantage, these roles are obsolete unless there is also the ageing king and queen, the court jesters, and the ugly witch that the prince has to fight...
the ruthless
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by IamSquid (undisclosed)
on Jun 22, 2004 - 09:41 PM
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This is a twofold situation: The attraction of youth and the dislike of age.
The attraction to youth is probably a blend of many different things, for one thing reliving the regret of youth. I often say to my self "that girl was CRAZY about mee, why didn't I do something?" But on a more biological level, youth is when people begin to become sexual creatures. This means that it's all new and exciting rather than casual or even mechanical. In youth we have more energy and are more enthusiastic about sex.
The fear of age is essentially the fear of death which is carved so deeply into this society to the point of mass neurosis (if not pyschosis). Many people fear death because, if nothing else they fear suffering. Seeing a person who is losing the ability to do the things we take for granted such as walking, seeing, hearing, etc. is frightening to most people.Furthermore, people who are not neccesarily Xian but exposed to Xian thinking (meaning the majority of us who grew-up in the US) fear death because they fear the idea of damnation and the older somebody is, the closer they are to death.
This is my opinion though.
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by Comedian (eccentrically_long@yahoo.com)
on Jun 22, 2004 - 11:01 PM
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"Age and treachery will beat youth and proficiency any day."
There was a line I heard on Comedy Central recently that stuck with me -
'How old are you, son?"
"22."
"Yeah, well I'm thirty-six. You ever been thirty-six?"
"No."
"Well I've been twenty-two, so SHUT THE FUCK UP."
Please don't misconstrue my point here for supporting age in any sense. Sure, experience is the greatest teacher, but you can be youthful and experienced. Not jaded; cynicism is the destructive element that erodes at the wisdom of any lesson a person learns. I'm just saying, for the point of points, that age rarely refines taste of an individual - people age worse than wine. Much worse.
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by Schizo (Aranea@spidersdance.com)
on Jun 23, 2004 - 02:26 AM
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BTW, what is with these little yellow underlined links in my article? I certainly didn't intend that my article on the beauty of aging should become an ad for anti-wrinkle cream! LOL
It's like that ad for anti-depressants at the bottom of the article speaking out against unnecessary medication of emotional problems.
"Isn't it ironic... don't you think... a little too ironic..."
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by Domkitten (saradevil@saradevil.com)
on Jul 03, 2004 - 02:54 PM
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Personally Schiz, I don't think you look a day over jail bait. And a line, a wrinkle, will only add to that. I love the way age looks on people who wear it well. I think think the real question of age and beauty comes when you have so many people who wear it badly.
I like to think of it this way. It's all about attitude. Ann Margret manages to still be sexy because she knows she is (and yes, I have a Bye Bye Birdie fetish and I'm not afriad to admit it). My grandmother on the hand talks day in and day out about how old she is, and how it has affected her, and because of it, I can't help but to look at her and think how old she is, and how badly it has hampered her.
What we need is wrinkle cream, the kind that gives you wrinkles and lines and makes it okay to have them. There was a time when being older meant having more character, not less beauty.
However, from what I've seen here, and hope to take advantage of myself someday, Shmeng women and men over 30 got it going on something feirce. I mean check out Callei in her new glasses, or Mono on a mountain top, these are are spring chickens, and they are older than (I'm thinking but I can't think of anything good) oooh, older than MRD.
I say hooray for age in all it's forms. Embrace it because like it or not, it will embrace you.
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Re: Age Before Beauty
by Starlight (elenmea@hotmail.com)
on Jul 06, 2004 - 12:50 AM
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I gotta tell you that I really loved reading this article. It points out a few things that I've always thought were quite beautiful myself. Silver hair is a beautiful thing, not something to dread.
I've always found silver streaks in hair to be a beauty mark of sorts. When I was a kid, my mother used to have hair down to about her upper thigh. It was straight as a board, very dark, and had a long silver streak about an inch across that was gorgeous. I always thought it made her look a bit liker Yvone de Carlo as Lily Munster. When I tell anyone about it I usually refer to it as my mother having had a Lily Munster streak.
I also find the silvering of temple hair to be quite flattering to a person's looks- not just in men, but in women also. I think everyone should do exactly what they want with their hair for whatever reason, and I refuse to subscribe to the idea that as a person gets older then they should wear shorter hair. Bollocks to that!
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