Be Your Own Beauty Boss

Women now get to have a decades-long stage of life before old age, that isn’t centred around the traditional role of breeder and facilitator of everyone else’s lives. But, we’re in constant conflict with how we feel, and how we think we should feel, pretending we’re ok with the beauty ideal being dictated by others, says Alana Kirk

Historically, women have been valued for our looks and position in society as mothers, so when these change it’s hard.

Until we realise the great thing about this midlife is we have the war paint and battle scars to start shedding the old paradigms that shrouded us. This is our chance to choose.

Look how women of every age, at every stage, are rejecting that stale stereotype.

But it’s not easy. Like a lot of women, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with my body most of my life. Have I undressed and lathered myself in un-firming self-loathing as well as the firming lotion? Yes. Because Kate Moss was the body ideal when I was in my formative teenage years, I came to ‘believe’ that my curves were something to be slightly ashamed of.

How many women have hated their body, linked their sense of identity to someone else’s dictate of what the ‘in’ body type is? Yet we’ve no control over the standards set of how we ‘should’ look.

In just the last hundred years, every imaginable body shape has been in style. From the busty, tiny-waisted Gilbert Girl, to the 1920s - no cleavage or waist - Flapper. From curvy Hollywood 1930s sirens to tall and angles (think torpedo bras) of the 1940s. Then Barbie hourglass becomes the ‘norm’, and ads for bust cream appear in magazines. Suddenly Twiggy is the ‘It girl’ and an ad for girdles uses a picture of a pear, captioned ‘This is no shape for a girl.’ (I kid you not.)

Then the long, lean Disco Queen, and it’s all about legs and the onslaught of the Super Models. But no sooner have we stretched ourselves and bought the push-up bras than the 1990s Waif look becomes the aspirational body beautiful. We entered a new century but were bullied by the same pressure with exposed, ripped abs and most women now just want to lie down and eat a bowl of Doritos. It’s exhausting.

None of this is real! Women come in all shapes and sizes, yet at any one time, huge swathes of us are made to feel unacceptable. Everything from our physical shape to our hair colour are held to account, bombarding our sense of self. The point is, beauty is a fully constructed thing. We’re at war with our bodies instead of the beauty marketing standards. Our body shape is our body shape – we need to dress to impress it, not some Instagram trend that will be gone in a week and we’ll be left with a cupboard full of bust cream/bum enhancers/diet pills, and deflated emotions.

Growing up I remember my mum always asking me “Do I look too young in this?” In her generation the worst crime you could commit was to be ‘mutton dressed as lamb’. Now the worst crime is to look too old.

So much has changed for women in just one generation we can feel adrift in a world that doesn’t quite know what to do with us. This extra twenty years we’ve been gifted in the middle of our lives is unique but a bit like the ‘teenagers’ that emerged in the late fifties there isn’t a clear definition of who and what we mid-agers are now.

We’re the rebels of mid-age, sometimes not sure of the cause. We have to identify with who we are. Not a forced body shape or style, but be confident, empowered and at ease with ourselves. Anything else is self-flagellation.

Who has seen ‘night out!’ scrawled in the calendar, simultaneously eyeing it with both excitement and dread? Excitement because: Yay, I’m going out to engage with actual adults, take off my big pants, put on some decent underwear and hunt out the lipstick; my gal pals, the fun, the craic, the ‘let’s have another bottle’ kind of night. Then there’s the dread because: I’m so tired I hope we can get a seat, there’s decent lighting so I can read the menu, and I can get home by 10pm so I can take off the tight-waisted jeans and get into my elasticated pyjamas.

The evening arrives and we leap into the shower. In our minds we have dressed ourselves in that outfit. Yes, in our minds those jeans go with that top, our hair will behave, and we’ll look societally acceptable. But after the shower, remembering to exfoliate, shave and pluck various areas of our face, we dress, only to stare deflated and dejected in the mirror because we look nothing like we did in our heads. I mean, nothing. We bulge here, we overhang there and our underwear gouges our flesh so we look like we’ve got a back boob and three thighs.

Alana Kirk’s new book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter is available now. Visit themidlifecoach.org

So we crumple deflated onto the bed before hauling ourselves up again to do the Wardrobe Ransack of Shame, the floor littered with the debris of defeat, and we either cancel or slump out in the Old Reliable Comfy dress wishing it was 10pm already and we were in our pyjamas.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Who has done this to us? Who is driving the bulldozer through our confidence when it comes to what we look like? Models have no role if they’re just a model whose body is their job and we’re expected to match it.

The role models are the real everyday women, short, tall, thin and curvy, squat, pear shaped, apple shaped, pineapple shaped, or whatever fruit is your passion shaped.

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