Every morning, I look in the mirror and begin to pull faces at myself. I screw up my mouth like a mouse about 10 times. Then I yank my cheeks up to my ear. I also take my tongue and roll it in the inside of my mouth several times. I pull up my forehead until it hurts and stretch my under-eye skin until I bruise it. This new form of self-torture is called face yoga, and frankly my dears, it feels ridiculous.
But every beauty beast on Instagram swears by it. If you don’t want to get Botox or fillers, don’t. Here’s another way of looking stupid.
The means and methods to combat ageing are really where every pharmaceutical company in this world is focused. They have not found a cure for cancer, or the common cold. But they insist that every product from their stable—either an injectable, or a serum, or an ingestible tablet—can make you younger. As if.
Nothing can make you younger other than eating vegetables, drinking a lot of water and having enough exercise to ensure good blood circulation. All we need is sunscreen and a daily moisturiser, everything else is an experiment. We all know this. And yet we hope against common sense to try and fix the unfixable.
There’s a new amazing biological horror film—The Substance—that chronicles the phenomenon of chasing youth medically. It stars Demi Moore as an ageing, fading celebrity who uses a banned drug to get younger to frightful effects. The film premiered at Cannes in May and has been a commercial and critical success in the US. It is a terrific movie that mirrors the bipolarity in a woman’s consciousness using the older Moore and her younger self as two separate entities. Moore’s character loses her job as a TV aerobic instructor as the producers find her too old. She gets introduced to the drug that causes her to birth a younger woman from a slit in her back. The younger woman must return to the original body within seven days or hell breaks irreversibly loose. Anyways, the two women despise each other and eventually both end up in a puddle of blood. This is the second film by French director Coralie Fargeat; her first, Revenge, was a revenge-post-rape thriller that won rave reviews.
The Guardian chronicles the life of a young woman who had a nose job at 22, and started injecting fillers at 25. When she got pregnant, she realised the horror fillers had done to her; her face was swollen thanks to the hyaluronic acid. She had to have three rounds of surgery to dissolve the fillers. She was left with four centimetres of loose skin, which she had to correct with a facelift. Just one doctor agreed to do the facelift as she was just 34, and it took nine hours to pick out the green balls of fillers from under her skin.
December is my birthday month. It has always been so festive and happy, with good weather and end-of-year cheer all around. This is usually when I am trawling websites to draw up a list of presents I will ask from my friends and family. But all I want from them now is a lot of lunches over several glasses of expensive wine, and a lot of movie nights.
December is actually frightful, it reminds us of how little time we have. Better to make faces at oneself and have a little laugh. That’s sure to give you a glow.
@namratazakaria