I recently returned from a dear friend’s 50th birthday in Thailand. While he is a very young 50, for most part of his life he didn’t celebrate his birthday for he didn’t like adding that candle on his cake. On the in-flight magazine, most pages were about waving away the years with gadgets that mimic being wands of magic. My favourite: there was an ad for a device that vibrates the double chin and any other unflattering gravity-stricken sag away after eight uses!
On the flight I saw The Age of Adaline. It’s a movie about Adaline Bowman, for whom, through peculiar events of nature, the process of ageing is arrested and she remains 29 for many decades. While this sounds like a blessing, the story unravels to reveal how her life is quite the contrary. Waiting for my bags at the Bangkok airport, I was staring into the screen over the carousel at a girl who looked like she wasn’t a day over 20 urging me to try the anti-ageing serum that she swears by. Hmm.
My mother has never divulged how long she’s been on this planet till today to any of her three children; she cryptically declares that ‘a woman never reveals her age’. My dad, on the other hand, has often resorted to adding a few years to his own age so that he’d be the oldest in the room and could hence pull rank. When someone pointedly asks me my age, it does irk me, I can’t quite tell you why, except that to my mind, I can’t think of it as relevant information to anybody, unless you’re my doctor, or my passport officer. My usual retort is, ‘How old do you think I am?’ I warn you going down that path brings its own risks, and can backfire. On many an occasion the answer has left me feeling shocked, as the estimates have varied from minus two years (glee) to plus 10 years (what the hell?!!).
As a model I have been acutely aware of the benefits of youthful looks to the profession. The girl next to me usually is younger (and thinner!) and the girl next to her is even more so. While the pressures of looking young make us models age faster and perhaps wiser than the average Jane out there, the heat of looking young seems to be a predominant burn for most. The beauty business today is a multi-billion industry primarily catering to our wanting to look younger (and fairer). Friends of mine who run beauty salons say they have clients as young as teenagers coming in for anti-ageing treatments. Men in their 30s are swapping notes on the best hair transplant studios. (Listen up boys, the word on the street is that if one is willing to cross the seas, Dubai is the go-to destination.)
Upon returning from Thailand, I was invited by my friend with whom I went to college for her mother’s 60th birthday. This aunt of mine is yet to dye her hair; she wears her greys with elegance, and owns up to her years happily. I find myself wondering where we are looking to go with this. While told to ‘act our age’ we want to look nothing like it. So what age are we supposed to act like then? What we look like, what we feel like or what our birth certificate tells us?
To me, this seems reasonable: Age really is nothing but a number. Today, life expectancy is higher than ever before and research says that 65 years is the onset of the ‘middle years’. While I can’t fathom what ‘40 is the new 30’, or ‘50 is the new 40’ is meant to convey, it’s perhaps better to try and be better than yesterday. What I mean by this is that let’s challenge to compete with ourselves in our own ways compared to what we could do yesterday. I recently saw a video of Johanna Quaas (with whom I share my birthday), and at 90 years of age she is still a practising gymnast. And defying age.(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLeoreilVp0). Let’s reprogramme ourselves to feel young rather than just to look it.
To that end, I have a host of remedies and recipes that I have inherited from my mother, and she from hers that help fight the signs of time. I’ll tell you more about that later, in good time.
