My Struggle to Age Gracefully When I Really Hate My Aging Skin

Severe skin damage has made me extra self-conscious — and extra defiant

My friend Sunny, who turned 40 a few months ago, has been talking a lot about getting Botox. She’s made an appointment to talk to her dermatologist about moving forward with this treatment and seems pretty determined to get rid of the lines in her forehead.

Honestly, I’m not really sure what lines she’s talking about. You see, Sunny is famous in her circle for not aging. I mean, sure, if you squint and look really, really closely, you might guess she is thirty-five. But she could easily pass for twenty-five.

She’s super tiny, fit, blonde, and has stunning, glowing skin. Basically, except for her small bust that she sometimes bemoans (because our culture only finds women who are very skinny and also big-breasted beautiful, which is mostly a biological impossibility), pretty much any woman who has seen her would wish they looked like her.

She’s stunning.

I have a hard time knowing how to respond when she brings up Botox. Obviously, I see my job as a feminist — and more importantly, a friend — to support whatever another woman wants to do with her body.

And also…as a feminist — and a friend — I question whether or not I should push back a bit more. Shouldn’t I remind Sunny of her beauty and her right to age without interventions that were designed to promote our culture’s ageist beauty standards?

Am I doing the right thing by supporting what she wants to do, even though she wouldn’t want to do it if our culture taught us to believe that women aged as beautifully as men did? Or should I be supporting her right to just be herself, exactly as she is, unaltered?

Aging is not an easy thing for women. In fact, it feels incredibly scary in a culture that treats women over 40 as irrelevant.

I distinctly remember the summer I turned 40. I definitely had a lot of “feelings” about the event. I was excited. But also terrified. I knew what was coming. I’d already experienced years of incessant teasing about the big 4–0 rapidly approaching and how old I was. And I’d had several doctors warn me of the serious health problems I was about to experience because, as one of them said, “It’s just a fact of life that after 40, the body starts to rapidly decline.”

Add to that the fact that I had not yet had children, despite a very deep desire to become a mother. I was already considered “geriatric” by pregnancy standards, and knew that hitting 40 would diminish my chances to have a baby in a very big way.

In other words, there’s no way for a woman to cross this threshold without it being a very serious transition in her life.

While I challenge the ageist notions that a woman over 40 is old or that our bodies begin to “rapidly decline” at this point, there is no getting around the fact that 40 is the beginning of the symbolic crone’s journey. That a woman at this age will soon begin the transition into perimenopause. That our fertility is changing, our hormones are changing, and yes, our appearances — our faces — will change in light of that.

It feels scary — sometimes terrifying — to acknowledge this.

But I often wonder how it might feel if we treated a woman’s aging process the way we treated men’s aging process. Under those more desirable circumstances, would it be so scary?

I understand Sunny’s feelings about her face. I truly do.

I understand because my face is in much worse shape than hers. You could blame that on the five years I have on her, but really, it’s another issue, entirely, because my skin looked far worse than Sunny’s 40-year-old skin when I was her age.

I am of Scandinavian and Celtic ancestry. People of my heritage hear early on that we don’t tend to age well with our sun-sensitive skin.

I grew up in L.A. where I averaged at least two full-body sunburns a year, despite my mother’s desperate attempts to get me out of the pool to reapply sunscreen. In the 80s, no one was yelling at their kids a warning about what an old hag they’d be by 40 if they didn’t put on that sunscreen. (And I wouldn’t have cared, anyways.)

In my teens and twenties, I struggled with acne. My dermatologists had me on a regular diet of chemical peels and retinol creams. My face was constantly irritated and cracked from all the interventions, and every few years, I’d switch doctors, lamenting that the peels and creams weren’t working and that I needed something new. And each time, the new doctor would insist that it would work “soon.” That I just had to “not give up.” Even ten years into this process, the fifth doctor wrote me another retinol prescription insisting that this same old treatment I’d been using for a decade would kick in “any day now.”

I was 30 by the time I took control of the situation and threw away the retinol creams and stopped getting chemical peels. My skin healed in a week — no more acne. No more irritation.

Though I use the term “healed” quite loosely because by that point, it was scarred and damaged beyond repair.

Today, though I have severe body image issues and a million areas that I’m ashamed to reveal to lovers because of cellulite or stretch marks or other “flaws,” there is no part of my body that I’m more self-conscious about than my face — the one part of me that I cannot hide.

I see a woman in her 70s when I look in the mirror. The skin that I have now is probably what Sunny will look like in her 70s. God help me when I actually get there.

It scares me to see how badly it is scarred, how horribly it folds and scrunches up when I rest my cheek on my hand in a photograph, how many age spots litter my cheeks.

And that’s not even to mention the severe wrinkles I have — wrinkles that none of my friends in their forties — or fifties — have. Mine are hardcore. They aren’t messing around.

If anyone needs Botox, it’s definitely me.

It’s hard for me to talk about my skin. Most people’s knee-jerk response is to tell me to go see a dermatologist and get a chemical peel, Botox, and/or laser treatments.

But here’s the thing: I do not trust dermatologists anymore. They are the ones who destroyed my skin in the first place.

I will also never again get a chemical peel. I am not interested in Botox. And I don’t know that I want to risk trying laser treatments that might make my skin even worse than it is now.

But here’s the bigger issue: I don’t want to feel like I have to fix my face.

I shouldn’t have a lot of these issues in the first place — I shouldn’t have been subjected to a medical system that did not listen to my concerns and discomfort, that did not allow me to advocate for my own health, but unfortunately, that’s what happened.

And now this is my face. This is what I have and regardless of the damage done by dermatologists, the aging process will continue to change my appearance. That’s the natural way of it. That’s the journey of being human.

I want to have the right to take that journey without feeling like shit about myself (which I already do, just to be clear).

As Justine Bateman said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair:

“Everybody’s talking about ‘empowering women,’ which I also find to be kind of a flaccid statement. Empowering them for what? To shove plastic in their faces? I don’t get that. How about feeling empowered to walk out in the world with an attitude that says, ‘Fuck you, I look great’?”

Yeah. I want to be able to walk out my door every day, with my age spots and deep wrinkles and terribly damaged skin and say, “Fuck you, I look great.”

I suppose this is exactly the feeling that I have when Sunny talks about her worries about her face. I want to scream to the whole world, “FUCK YOU!” for making my best friend — my best friend who is so far above average attractiveness that she could be a movie star — feel like she needs to stick a needle in her face to remain beautiful.

Fuck you, world. Fuck you so hard for that.

And I could give it the same sentiment on my own behalf.

I feel hideous because of my skin. I literally feel unfuckable and unlovable. Sure, I look fine in most photographs — cameras don’t often pick up the full scope of the damage. But in person…yikes.

This has been a major issue for me during my explorations in online dating. Just how bad is it? Am I going to meet someone in real life for the first time and see them recoil when they get a glimpse of this skin in person? Are they going to say, “Whoa, that’s not what you looked like in your photos”?

I’d be mortified.

Hell, I’m mortified outside of dating. I’m mortified to go to the grocery store or the post office. What must people think of this woman who has a middle-aged body but an elderly woman’s face?

And yet…I do nothing. I have chosen to take no action, except to keep trying to nurture my skin in all the ways my former doctors prevented me from doing. It gets oatmeal and honey masks, shea butter moisturizers, and sunflower oil in place of soap.

I’m not going to go back to a dermatologist. I’m not going to get another peel. Or laser treatments. Or Botox. I’m going to live with this face as it is and support its aging journey.

It feels like the right thing to do. At least for me.

I can see that it’s not the right thing for Sunny. Or for lots of women. And I never, ever want to judge my fellow females and make them feel badly for the choices that they make.

So while I’m still torn about how to respond to this issue, while I still feel that on some level I am betraying my female friends by supporting their desire to pursue anti-aging procedures, I will continue on this path, as well. Take no action.

In the end, even though I want to fight like hell to protect our right to age with dignity, I know there are no simple answers here. I know ultimately that the only thing that matters is supporting women’s right to choose how they maintain their health and cultivate their beauty.

It’s an imperfect answer to an imperfect question. But right now, it’s all I’ve got.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

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