By Brooke Berman
Remember the iconic scene in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil where Katherine Helmond has her face stretched out? That’s what I used to think of when I heard the phrase “getting work done.” Clearly, I thought, nobody I know would ever do that.
And yet here we are, decades later, and the things I have done for beauty include veganism, and also its opposite (red meat and bone broth for collagen); sunscreen and Vitamin C serum; monthly facials; Gua Shua (if you know, you know; I keep mine in the freezer); microcurrent devices; eye masks; Korean sheet masks (my husband brought several home from a South Korean writer’s retreat); expensive products as well as drugstore products and mail-order products; food as a beauty product (raw honey, slightly cooled green tea bags as eye masks, not at the same time); face yoga; facial acupuncture (I loved it, but it’s prohibitively expensive); and most recently a visit to Face Gym for a “workout” that boiled down to a face massage and electro-stim (this was a third of the cost of facial acupuncture).
The things I say I won’t do, but spend a great deal of time reading about on Reddit forums, include neurotoxins, lasers, injectables, and face tape (like Frownies). I am intoxicated by the idea of micro-needling (with or without plasma because, see facial acupuncture above). Both time and budget pull me back from the edge again and again.
None of these things occurred to me in my 20s or 30s. I assumed I’d age naturally and appreciate myself despite a little cellulite. I had no idea what it would feel like to turn 50 and watch my face begin to “fall.” I’m being dramatic here, I don’t think it’s actually fallen, at least God I hope not, but I notice things I didn’t used to notice. And I care more than I imagined I’d care.
My mother was beautiful, until she wasn’t. But age didn’t steal my mother’s beauty; illness and a bad marriage did that. At 40, she was luminous and dressed in Versace. At 50, she struggled. And at 65, she died. Had she been free of diabetes and its complications – and a shitty husband and his complications? Had she been allowed to age naturally? Well, who knows.
My grandmother, on the other hand, lived to 100 and had great skin. She did very little to take care of it. While my aunt swears that Grandma Ida was a frequent visitor to the Neiman Marcus cosmetics department, I remember her telling me that Oil of Olay was her secret. Apart from that, she didn’t do facials, she didn’t do Botox, and she never got anything “lifted.” She ate red meat, drank coffee every day — no alcohol, she just didn’t like it — and never smoked. Her sole concession to anti-aging was hair; she got it dyed at a salon until roughly the last month of her life. She also worked well into her 90s selling real estate. I think of my grandmother’s beauty as emanating from her innate strength. Ida was a woman who knew how to get things done.
When I was younger, beauty eluded me. Unlike my cute blonde mother, I was awkward and artsy. I spent my 20s hiding in oversized clothes, pursuing unrequited crushes, writing in my journal, and standing behind more conventionally attractive friends. I began to feel beautiful in my 30s when my work as a playwright started gaining traction and getting produced. I imagined that, like my grandma, if beauty came from independence and creative power, it would never leave me.
But lately, I wonder. At night, I fixate on under-eye bags and jowls. I’m addicted to Vitamin C serum. I obsess over eye cream even though my dermatologist insists nobody needs it. There are the aforementioned micro-needling fantasies. I hydrate like nobody’s business.
In the US, approximately 2.84 billion dollars was spent on Botox in 2022, and 3.6 billion on hyaluronic acid fillers. Last year, multiple news outlets ran pieces on the popularity of injectables for Gen Z as “preventative” skincare. Today’s young people treat these things as normal. I often think of Cynthia Nixon’s line in Sex and the City: “Are we doing this now?”
I am the filmmaker behind a movie about a middle-aged single mom making room for herself (Ramona at Midlife, currently streaming) and I have been outspoken about the fact that neither I nor the actress I wrote the lead role for have ever “had any work done” — that is, of course, unless you count the very long list above, which did at times feel like work.
During production, our makeup artist suggested that Yvonne Woods, the actress playing Ramona, wear forehead tape to appear younger in a particular scene. Yvonne refused. There are close-ups in the movie in which we see the lines on Yvonne’s lovely face — crow’s feet, “elevenses” — and our camera goes close. We do not apologize. This is what middle-aged women look like, we said. And when I watched the dailies, I liked what I saw.
Which leads to the question: If I can appreciate the lines on someone else’s face, why can’t I appreciate my own? In her amazing Substack, How Not To F*ck Up Your Face, former beauty director and writer Valerie Monroe writes: “It is crucial to learn to love your face no matter how you choose to accept or confront the aging process, because you’ll never be really happy with how you look unless you can actually see yourself uninhibited by objectification.”
According to Monroe, it doesn’t matter whether or not you “get work done,” what matters is learning to see your face and body without objectifying them.
So why do I hang on to the skin lab brochures? Why do I care? All I can say is, I do. I am human, and I want to be pretty. In a society that still values and judges women by looks, what we look like and how we’re received still feel inextricably linked.
Since turning 50, I collect pictures of older women who inspire me such as Julianne Moore, Diane Keaton, Diane von Furstenberg, Isabelle Huppert, and Ramona’s idol, Patti Smith. They are gorgeous, all of them. Sometimes I wonder which ones have had work done. Sometimes I don’t care. I admire these women, especially the ones who have allowed themselves to change, to become the next version of themselves, because of what they do. And okay, yes, they look great. But they’ve allowed themselves to age without apology and without losing their voices. That is what I aspire to.
When you close your eyes and see yourself, what age are you? At what age did you feel most visible? Or valued? I would like the answer to be: right now.
Brooke Berman is a playwright, filmmaker and memoirist living in New York City. Her feature debut Ramona at Midlife, a movie about a midlife working mom reclaiming her voice and hitting her stride, is now streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video, and Google Play.