Three weeks ago, my scalp sprouted four new grey hairs. This revelation followed a thicker-than-usual clump of hair in the shower drain four weeks ago. Perhaps this quite literal silver lining will grow into fierce wingtips, à la Paulie from the Sopranos. A girl can only dream.
These greys have sent me into a tailspin.
After counting all four hairs and ensuring there were only four hairs, I inspected my face. Same old acne scars, gaping pores (thanks, Papa), patches of peach fuzz I’d missed while dermablading, when suddenly the lines from years of laughing so hard I toppled over and cried with my friends were engraved in my cheeks. Quelle horreur! I smiled, which was more of a grimace, to see how obvious it was. It was obvious.
Next up for inspection was the forehead crease I inherited from my dad’s dad, which I have had from inception. There I am in my sonogram pictures, tiny face pressed up against her belly, with the same perma-scowl as my grandpa. Since the seventh grade, I have been forcing my eyebrows apart and raising them, a motion that has now caused three large lines in my forehead. So, to prevent wrinkles, you get wrinkles.
𓍯𓂃
Much to my chagrin, my younger sister showed me a TikTok a couple of months ago.
The girl in the video was explaining to a bunch of haters that she was not in her 40s; she was 26— she’d just been through a lot of trauma. My younger sister showed it to me with such shock, as if there was no way she was under 30. I asked her why she felt it was important to show me this and why she was even watching this kind of content.
“That’s kind of mean,” I said defensively, seeing so much of myself in the girl in the video. I didn’t let her explain that this was an online trend before turning away in disgust.
Then, last week, a jumpscare posing as a Vox article popped up on my phone screen: Why is Gen Z aging like milk?
My jaw literally dropped as grey hair started growing from my ears. I started going through menopause. Fire that fucking editor, I thought. Journalism is dead!
(They have since updated the webpage headline, or maybe that was the notification headline; regardless, I still haven’t been hired by any news outlet, so, good for her, I guess.)
This mention of my sister’s TikTok for-you page doesn’t negate the fact that I scroll through r/BravoRealHousewives thrice a week and see dozens of posts about a Housewives’ appearance. I don’t have any social media besides Pinterest, Substack, and my beloved web browser subreddits. And the Bravo fans are rabid. Almost 100 people are active on this subreddit every time I check it.
Does anyone know Erika’s injector? They ask, as if they weren’t saying she looked gaunt last week and that she needs to eat something before she gets scurvy. Now, they celebrate her; her work is done well despite the widows, the orphans, and the snow in Pasadena.
The replies are filled with repetitive sentiments: Dorit should take notes!… Kyle could never!… She’s gonna have 12 faces like Big Kathy!… Umm, that’s not injections. She had a facelift, idiot… At least she can move her mouth, unlike some people…
I don’t even like RHOBH (they are grotesquely rich yet somehow manage to be exceptionally boring), but my heart pangs when I see a thousand comments on a post about their looks. Probably because I’m projecting.
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Last weekend, I attended a friend’s wedding. At the afterparty, an overly friendly +1 held me hostage. (Much like Geena Davis, I am also Dying of Politeness, but that’s for another essay.) She started talking about Botox while holding a comically large glass of champagne in her hand, liberally refilling the glass with her personal bottle.
“Girl, I would never touch my face with a needle,” she said, her expression exaggerating her wrinkles. “My younger friends are all filler-ed up, but they look older than me!”
She is only 35.
I nodded attentively, trying not to agree too strongly with any of her opinions, adding, “Right on,” while staring into a crowd of thirty-somethings.
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A coworker once told me she can’t watch Sex and the City because “It only confirms my fears about being thirty and single,” she said. “It scares me.”
She’s right. The girls are barely older than my hostage but are painfully envious of the eternally sexy twenty-something, as if the twenty-something is an enigma, not an age. The twenty-something is the Eighth World Wonder.
They talk about themselves as if they’re already dead.
Miranda, please tell me. Are the twenty-somethings gonna take me out back and shoot me on my 30th? Must I tape the Martha Stewart GQ cover on my mirror now and start praying men still think I’m sexy at 76? Should I ask TikTok how old I look? Also, girl, why is your son an absolute menace to society? Brady should be jailed!
I wonder what the coworker thinks of the reboot. Does she think it’s refreshing to see fifty- and sixty-somethings rebuild their life, find liberation in aging, navigate grief, and still orgasm?
Is she less scared?
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In the summer of 2006, I had a fever of 102. It persisted for several days. Accompanied by it was a thick, red, splotchy rash that worsened at night. I could not move or walk. My younger sister and I were staying with my aunt, uncle, and cousins at their home upstate.
My aunt dunked me in an oatmeal bath, thinking it was a nasty poison ivy reaction. The rash didn’t go away. She then drove my sister and me back down to the Bronx, where my mom took me to the hospital. For 3 weeks, I lived in Montefiore Children’s Hospital, getting spinal taps and midnight blood draws, and had an art therapist teach me how to fold origami frogs. I spent my birthday there.
At first, they thought it was lymphoma— the symptoms nearly mirrored it. Then the doctors suggested I had Spina Bifida because two of my cousins in Ireland have it. Turns out it was just arthritis. Systemic idiopathic juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, but still. The old lady disease. Yeah, like the one your grandma has.
When explaining my situation to my sixth-grade friend at her parent’s summer house in the Poconos, asking her if her mom would be okay monitoring me as I inject myself in my thigh with Kineret, the only way I can explain it is by saying it’s arthritis, like what your grandma has. And I need your mom’s help, please.
Back in February of this year, I was told by my ophthalmologist that I might have glaucoma. She’s not sure, but the signs are bad. They made me take the test three times before the main doctor came in and examined my eye herself. She decreased the prescription and booked an appointment in August to reassess the size of my optic nerve and the pressure and demanded I follow up with a rheumatologist.
“The nerve might be overworking itself,” she said. “Let’s see how you fare with a reduced prescription.”
Two weeks later, at my annual physical, my PCP urged me (in a rather nerve-wracking way) to call a rheumatologist after I disclosed my symptoms. She gave me the name and number of a doctor in Manhattan. I called her six times, with no reply. As for my new “corrected” prescription, I can’t read the title of the books on my nightstand. I need to call the optho back.
Arthritis and glaucoma. Old lady diseases.
𓍯𓂃
I want to curl up in a ball and rot when women declare “More power to you” in response to another woman electively going under anesthesia, the knife, or an inch-long needle.
In September, I got two teeth pulled as part of my orthodontic treatment plan. Instead of paying over $2,000 for extractions in NYC, my amazing sister and cousin drove me to a lovely dental clinic outside of Philly, where they charge $99 per tooth. It is run by women, and we talked about the Spice Girls and the best Pellegrino seltzer flavors. A passing SEPTA bus’s LED screen said GO EAGLES!!!
While sitting in the back of my sister’s Honda Fit as the gauze swelled with blood and adrenaline coursed through me, I had a damning realization: it was genuinely insane to get my much-needed canines removed so I could get rid of my much-despised vampire smile. And it is incomprehensible that people get fat cut out of their arms and implanted in their butt. Or silicone in the butt. Or those guys who get their legs broken and metal rods inserted in their shins and thighs to make them taller, but their arms remain short.
It’s really bleak. A harrowing visual, frankly.
In the month leading up to my Invisalign consultation, I feverishly repeated the same prompts in the Google search bar: “crooked teeth” + “cardiovascular disease” and only saw articles published by dental and orthodontic offices making sweeping claims that if your teeth are crooked, you’ll basically have a heart attack. Or get gum disease. Like, oh my god, okay. I’ll do it! Plus, it is gonna make me beautiful.
Days following the extraction, I found this Undark article:
Some individual studies do suggest that people with crowded teeth are more likely to have dental problems. For example, a 2000 study found that patients with crowded teeth had more plaque and pathogenic bacteria. And a study published in 2017 found that among nearly 15,000 participants, people who hadn’t received orthodontic treatment were more likely to have a serious gum infection called periodontitis. But because neither study was randomized, it’s difficult to know whether variables like socioeconomic class — a well-known factor in oral health — swayed the findings.
[…] the University of Washington School of Dentistry carefully selected 12 studies on orthodontics and dental health. The group’s research, published in 2008 in The Journal of the American Dental Association, found that the dental health of individuals who received orthodontic treatment actually worsened slightly over the long term. A more recent study published in the June 2020 issue of The American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics analyzed 7 studies on orthodontics and oral health. While this study didn’t find any evidence for worsened oral health, it came to a similar conclusion: The authors couldn’t find sufficient evidence in the scientific literature for the health benefits of orthodontic treatment.
This is it, I thought. It’s too late now — my first foray into cosmetic work. I’m going to look like Chloe Cherry by 2025.
I do fear we are only a few years away from legitimate baby botox. My 2030 prediction is that the FDA will approve the injectable, and the anti-abortion ads on the New Jersey Turnpike will be replaced with my sonogram picture and an 1800 number begging passing drivers to call today.
Wow, the commuters will think, clutching their chests so distractedly they nearly crash into the median. That baby has the 11 lines of a grown man.
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Juvederm just dropped an all-new filler. It’s called Skinvive. The name implies your skin is dead, but they promise this injection will revive it.
ICYMI: your skin is the largest organ of your body. And it can totally restore itself.
Women under the age of 25 are getting Botox at jarring rates. Dr. Shereene Idriss, an NYC-based dermatologist, shared an unsurprising fact about her Gen Z clientele.
"They're coming in without any lines or built-in markings on their skin," she said. "And they're coming in with a fear of aging."
And then, of course, the morbid side of it: Thousands of women have died in the last few years due to complications following cosmetic surgery. Dying in Mexico or DR or Turkey, or on the plane home. Notably, many of them are young Black women and/or mothers. Mother of three, 32, dies after a Brazilian Butt Lift.
Many of their obituary articles stated the women were targets of Mommy Package or Barbie Body plastic surgery advertisements.
We all know that is an easy and tired take: Women getting cosmetic work = bad. Plastic surgery = not feminist. That’s not what I am trying to say— but I’m not versed enough to dissect this topic with the respect, care, and decency it deserves. (Jessica DeFino explains it best.)
But it feels like we are entering an era where cosmetic work and procedures and surgeries aren’t just commonplace and normalized, but the deaths caused by them are, too.
Isn’t it crazy? The desire to be beautiful before you die, but you die trying?
Wow. So deep, girl!
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If you haven’t noticed, this isn’t as much of an essay as it is a rambling stream of consciousness about something we should all be so privileged to do—age.
With that being said, I don’t know how to end this. I don’t really think this post could ever be finished. You’d find me sitting at my desk at age 80, going on and on about how my granddaughter is worried she’s losing collagen, shaking my curled arthritic finger, and scowling while dictating Kids these days! into an iPad that same granddaughter bought me. This is brilliant, I’ll announce, and hit publish with my knuckle.
At least I hope to.