Ever since I saw Nora Ephron on Colbert flogging her new book, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Like Warner, I have to admit liking the idea of make up and girlie stuff, but I coasted on short skirts and quirkiness to grab the boys when I was younger. I never really spent all that much time with maintenance. By maintenance, we mean hair dye, highlights, nails, facials, fine hair cuts, moisturizer, lip gloss, defoliation, cuticle elimination, curling irons, straightening irons, botox, chemical peels, self tanners, bronzers, yadda, yadda. When I was young, the cost and the boredom scared me away. The thought of spending more than 2 minutes on my hair was painful. So I would throw on a mini skirt and black tights, and be good to go.
But now I have to spend a little more time on maintenance. Those short skirts are increasingly out of the question. And soon, I won’t be able to deal with the white hairs amidst the red by simply plucking them out.
Judith speculates that we spend so much time on maintenance as we get older because of the bag lady fear. I’m not sure if that is really the root of our concern with our roots, but there is such thing as the bag lady fear. Comes from living in a city with so many homeless people about. Anyone with a scrap of humanity can imagine themselves in a similar situation. I know many people who have decided what would be the best subway station to live at, if they should suddenly become homeless.
When we were on the party circuit last week, we stopped into an open house in Westchester. Ian charged up the stairs. The boy is a heat seeking missile for Thomas trains. Jonah trailed after him. Steve joined the men in the living room. I poked my head in the kitchen, where the women were, but beat a quick retreat to the living room. The kitchen was full of overly maintained women. A quick once over revealed a long list of treatments — professional blow out, highlights, French manicure, the predictable labels from boots to scarf, perfectly shadowed eye lids, bling dripping from ears, wrists, and neck. And the dumbest eyes. If you spend all your time in the salon, you really don’t have much else to talk about.
Stepping up the maintenance as we get older is normal, however, there is a point when it’s too much. Look at Meg Ryan’s face to see what happens when we over maintain.
Would you ever get botox?
And more My sinus headache is disturbing work, so let me add just another paragraph or two to this post.
At present, I am over maintained. My husband got me a gift set from a fancy-smancy perfume shop for Christmas — shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, and moisturizer. Usually, I’m a drug store sort of girl — Pantene and whatever soap is on sale. But this is nice stuff, so I branched out yesterday and used the new products. Boy, did I stink of lemons and roses. A little sniff of this stuff is nice, but layered together (that’s the lingo, boys), it was over powering. I would walk into a room and watch people get a concerned look on their faces. Nostrils would flare a little. My hair is super fluffy right now, but I think I’m just not the type of person who likes to announce her presence before she turns the corner. I’m going to have to parsel this stuff out very sparingly.
Apt. 11d 
I would if I got a free coupon. Right now, I’d rather apply the money to my mortgage, and by the time the mortgage is paid off, I’ll be too old for botox to help much (I’m 40, and we have 349 more payments to go).
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Nope.
And, I have to say, the automatic weapon line freaks me out. I know you’re not serious about it, but the fact that you’d say it flippantly is a sign of how accustomed we’ve become to mass violence against women. (And I do think it’s about women — I find it hard to imagine someone saying the same thing about a group of annoying men.)
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If I were to get serious about maintenance, there are plenty of things I could do before botox. I don’t even wear lipstick now.
I used to dye my hair red, mainly to cheer myself up in graduate school, but now that I have a lot more grey hairs, changing the color would seem like covering up instead of just fun.
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(Oh, I’ve fantasized about having an automatic weapon in a roomful of annoying men before… but I am the angry one.)
Eventually I’ll start coloring my hair. I’m hoping to put it off for as long as I can, because I like the way my non-color-treated hair feels.
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I can assure you that I have the automatic weapon thought about certain men, whenever the subject of the War in Iraq comes up. But I’ll take it out when I have a chance.
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there’s no way I would ever purposely get cosmetic surgery for vanity. I think its insane. its one thing to spend your time looking your best and slathering stuff on your face…but plastic surgery looks horrible, even on beautiful women like Catherine Deneuve. you can always tell.
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Not sure what connection you’re making between maintenance and being a bag lady. Can’t you decide not to maintain but still be well-groomed and not look like a bag lady?
This NY Times article suggests that spending a lot of money on skin maintenance is a waste. That was a relief to me, as my skin care regimen is pretty much what they recommend, sans sunscreen.
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The connection between over maintenance and bag ladies wasn’t mine. Either Warner or Ephron made that point. They say that women maintain because they fear being disposable, like a bag lady. Women are very conscious that their age makes them increasingly vulnerable, so they primp and preen to fight back those demons. Could be.
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Wait a minute. The fear of becoming a bag lady is the fear of being so impoverished that you cannot afford a home. The fear of growing older is the fear of no longer appearing attractive (as attractive is defined by patriarchal society). This analogy is substituting class for age, as in: I am terrified of growing older *because then I will look poor* and so I will spend gobs of money in order not to look poor (i.e. older). Fight the power: embrace your gray hair and wrinkles and hang on to your job, your sanity, and your house.
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Ah, thanks for the clarification. I’ll never quite understand the cosmetic culture, alas. Funny – I’m watching an Ugly Betty rerun right now.
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embrace your gray hair and wrinkles and hang on to your job, your sanity, and your house.
I would add: Spend the money on a college ed-ja-ma-cashun or learning a skilled trade instead of cosmetic surgery. Skills matter more than a pretty young face in the job market unless you are a fashion model. Oh, and make sure you have friends – if worst does really come to worst there will be people to help you out.
Most bag ladies aren’t bag ladies just because they got old. They are, by and large, unskilled, have mental health issues, are estranged from support networks, and were poor even when they were young and (perhaps) pretty. Cosmetic surgery might get you more wolf-whistles for a bit longer but it’s not going to save your butt from destitution.
This leads me to a larger issue: Personal solutions to what are society-wide problems. Instead of plastic surgery, an increase in the minimum wage and universal health care would do a lot more to mitigate the lot of poor women.
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Hm, I’ve been dying my hair for about 10 years (I starting getting grey hairs in high school!), and I pluck the increasingly common hairs off my chin, but I ignore the rest of ‘maintenance’ and can’t imagine doing all of that boring and/or painful stuff routinely. I do, however, buy my mother (and my husband) books that I want to read after they’ve read their gift. Sometimes, if I am very, very careful and don’t eat chocolate while reading, I even read the book before I give them away.
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Sandy D. — I’m a big fan of pre-reading gifts. I think it is an excellent idea.
Allurophile is right about all the things that women should do to protect themselves from poverty, which becomes a bigger risk as we age. I’m sure that women who coast on their looks, rather than other traits, are at bigger risk after they turn forty.
I grew up in an upper middle suburb are here and for a while, some of the moms in the town were having surgery to lower their voices in order to be more sexy for their husbands.
I wonder if Ephron is not so much worried about literally becoming a bag lady. I mean she’s pretty successful and has enough stashed away, so that she can live comfortably for the rest of her life. I wonder if she’s more worried about being forgotten at cocktail parties, dropped from the TV circuit, unable to secure movie deals. I mean the world isn’t that interested in dowdy old ladies. Nobody wants to be treated like a bag lady, even if that bad lady has a summer home in the Hamptons.
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That’s a good point, Laura, about Nora Ephron and her circumstances. I think that falling from social grace due to aging is a “beautiful people” phenomenon, or at least one peculiar to circles that value glitz and glamor. Women in more modest circumstances don’t get that nearly as much – I mean the Friends of the Library, animal shelter, or bird-watching club isn’t going to kick anyone out on the basis of age and looks. And then there’s the Red Hat society which is especially and exclusively for women over 50.
But for somebody like Ephron the reality is going to be different. That’s one reason I’m glad I’m not a celebrity or Beautiful Person. It’s a glass mountain all too easy to tumble down, for men and women alike, and if yesterday’s hot property has little education and few skills, he or she is up a creek (look at the sad lives of many has-been actors and rock stars). At least Ephron is a talented writer, she will probably never be entirely relegated to social Siberia no matter how old she gets.
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I honestly don’t think the bag lady analogy holds up except as a coded phrase for “letting go of yourself” which shows a bit of ignorance about who bag ladies really are (or was a typo for “bad lady”? (joke!)). And I’m a little surprised at this discussion – you all must be very young, very beautiful, very educated and very self-confident. Most women I know who “maintain” do so first because we’re trained to look nice (“objects” and all) and if the training “took”, it feels impossible to reject that training when the gray hairs and looser jowls begin. Plus, we’re all part of the Great Youth Culture so we don’t want to get older and how we look pretty much determines how old we
arefeel. And I have to say that no one I’ve talked with about cosmetics and maintenance associates it with finances.LikeLike
And this is when things go in a direction that I don’t like. I’m very much middle of the road of the girlie debate. Unlike others, I don’t think that lipstick or footwear has much to do with my feminism. Some people are just more femme than others; I’m probably middle of the spectrum. I’m really not all that judgy on these matters.
However, I do think that there’s a point when it all becomes silly and when you step over the line to “over maintenance.” Don’t ask me what that point is. You know it when you see it. When a woman spends too much of her time primping not because of personal enjoyment, but out of desperation of losing her man. When her appearance is her only source of pride and more time is spent in the salon than doing anything else, she has surely reached that point of over maintenance.
I do understand how some women can get to that point. There is so much pressure to be concerned with make-up and shopping. And society does not look kindly on women who don’t primp, especially older women. But it is all rather sad.
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When her appearance is her only source of pride and more time is spent in the salon than doing anything else, she has surely reached that point of over maintenance.
I’m with Laura. I color my hair, I wear makeup, I’m not even averse to the idea of plastic surgery one day. However, I’m not going to kid myself by thinking that life will be a-dinga-derry because I primp. The fact that I’m back in school going for my M.A. will do a lot more for my job prospects than my tinted hair. Just sayin’.
As Laura says, when it ceases to be something fun and turns into an act of desperation, that’s when primping or plastic surgery turns to over-maintenance.
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That bit about women having surgery to lower their voices to be more sexy to men seems weird to me. I thought (Demi Moore notwithstanding) that high-pitched voices were perceived as more feminine and therefore more sexy. A low voice on a woman is associated with being butch.
Plus, it just seems over the top (even moreso than Botox) to have surgery to change your voice!
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I personally feel women step up the primpting as they get older to avoid becoming invisible. You get used to the attention when you’re younger, and when it starts disappearing … it’s not like you’re thinking, “I may end up a bag lady” in the socioeconomic way. But you might end up a bag lady in that you are no longer seen. IMHO this happens to everyone in our culture as they get older, with some variation in the extent to which it’s damaging. We’re just too youth-obsessed; the aging process is viewed with fear and disdain.
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i haven’t increased my maintenance over the years. i’ve always been a make-up free, wash&wear kind of gal. i don’t color my hair, even though the grey is steadily increasing. maybe because i started getting grey hairs at 21, i don’t associate them with aging at all. massive moisturizing is about the extent of the regimen, besides shaving.
that said, i like that i am more invisible now than when i was younger. i feel more free to go on about my business, and i definitely feel like i am taken more seriously. that could be as much from an increase in self-confidence as from aging, but whatever it is, i don’t feel compelled to hang on to my youthful looks.
that, i think, would largely be an exercise in frustration.
but it’s something one certainly sees around, though not so much where i live where the natural (i.e. aging hippy) look is more prevalent than the overly-maintained.
so, no, i would never do botox. ever.
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Moisturizing Sunscreen
Be sure to use a moisturizing lotion like Parfait Visage, Washing your face, particularly with h
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