to be freaked out by how much our faces change between 45 - 55 years old?

[tallowspa]

I'm just back from visiting a friend in the flesh I haven't seen since 2019. It was really lovely to see her but she was very down about her looks and how much she feels her face has changed in the past few years as she is now 53. I think she still looks amazing but she does look different now. She is 7 years older than me and the last time we were together you wouldn't have thought she was older at all but now the age difference was visible.

I work with women of all ages and one woman in her late 50's keeps saying how she looked good and like herself up until she was about 51 then within a year her face, skin and body changed and now she has just had to get used to never really feeling happy about how she looks or like herself.

Even looking at photos of actresses with all the surgeons and treatments at their disposal you see the same changes so I don't think it is something you can really escape, its inevitable and natural.

It just freaks me out though, I am 46 and still look like myself and I finally feel happy with how I look probably for the first time in my life but I know that over the next decade my face will change and probably not for the better.

I'm not on about looking young, or attractive and I know that aging is a privilege and that the alternative to aging is death but I still feel so freaked out my how much our faces seem to change at this time of life, menopause I suppose. I am on HRT (since I was 42) and that probably helps but obviously it isn't a miracle worker and these changes still occur.

I don't mind going grey or getting lines on my face its everything else and how our faces seem to fundamentally alter that freaks me out!

Well everyone still recognises me so I can't look that different just older which is normal.

@Goldenbear I’m not talking about ‘my looks’. Clearly god forbid! 🤔 I’m talking about changing physically. No longer being as flexible etc. That’s got nothing to do with subliminal advertising and quite frankly I fail to see how it enriches my bloody life and relationships. You get old, you die. The older you get, the more people you say goodbye to.

Im 50 this year. Although fit and healthy, I’ve noticed in the last 3 years that im changing and im putting it down to the menopause.

my skin and hair is thinner, eye bags, midriff expanding yet im still a size 8-10 just looking bloated.

there is too much out there on botox, lip fillers, face taping, etc

i dont want to look younger, just want to look my best.

In that case, what I’d recommend is moderate exercise and yoga. Gets rid of bloated bellies. Find something you love doing. And eat real food. Your skin will look better and you’ll move like a young person. I see lots of midlife women through my job and apart from going overboard with tweakments, the thing which makes some of them look older is when they can’t get up and move like a youngster.

My skin is clearer than a teenager! Nothing wrong with it just thinning.

I already eat healthily, walk every day, yoga twice.

Why would I want to be mistaken for someone 25 years younger? I was all over the place in my early twenties. A flibbertigibbet as my mum would have said! I am now older, (a bit) wiser, and I believe taken a bit more seriously. Mainly because I no longer assume my looks will do the taiking (I think I may have done this in the past, to my shame).
Besides my daughter has now taken up the young beauty mantle, combining it far more assuredly with her brains. I really don't want her to think I'm in some weird beauty contest with her!

I'm sorry I really can't buy into this! Ageing absolutely is a privilege.

I've just turned 50 and I'm no super model - trust me on this one ... but I've already lost so many close friends to hideous cancers and other ailments I couldn't give a shit what I look like - I just appreciate every day on earth. I lost my Mum to ovarian cancer over 9 years ago, I lost my cousin to bowel cancer almost 3 years ago, I've just found out my daughter has a tumour on her cervix and she's only a teenager FFS and I'm currently visiting my sister in a hospice who has an aggressive brain tumour and I'm just praying that she reaches her 55th birthday next month. Next week I attend the funeral of one of my oldest friends who died just before Christmas of prostate cancer and leaves behind a teenage son. Worrying about how I'm going to age is the last thing on my mind. Hoping I get to see old age is an absolute bloody blessing!

Health and happiness are so bloody important in this world and I wish that people took these things more seriously when they were younger. I was fortunate to have a wonderful, strong granny and mother, both sadly long since passed, who looked after themselves well and knew how to live, love and laugh.

Who gives a fuck what you look like - be a good, kind person, look after yourself as best you can on the inside as well as the outside and just hope that you're one of the lucky ones!

So sorry I completely misread your post - I read it as "you can't tell, she has had the very best money can buy" and was incredulous. No nerve touched, I just needed to read it properly!! Apologies.

Thank you @herewegoroundthebastardbush appreciated.

I totally get how you feel. Until my mid-40s I looked 10 years younger than my actual age but now, at 54, I’ve got wrinkles and crepey skin and saggy bits that I’m just not ready to accept! In most other respects I’m enjoying getting older but I’m quite shocked at how much the physical appearance thing is bothering me as I’ve never thought of myself as someone who cared about their looks. I feel like I’m letting the side down but I can’t help it. Maybe being single (and hoping I won’t be forever) makes me more aware of it? The weird thing is, when I look at other women my age with the same amount of wrinkles etc, I never think they look awful!

The weird thing is, when I look at other women my age with the same amount of wrinkles etc, I never think they look awful!

I think that's because you are looking at their mobile, active faces. Whereas with yourself, you are staring at yourself in a mirror. I never think my much older friends look awful because I see them as a whole, talking, laughing or doing cool stuff. We need to remember that's how others see us as well.

Aging is a privilege denied to many, just thank your lucky stars you get to go through the process!

I understand what you’re saying but I think it’s ok to still have feelings about seeing your face in the mirror and realise you look the same age as your mother or even grandmother. I have had cancer and a recent scare it may have come back (🤞 it hasn’t) but I still sigh when I see my drooping jowls and thinning lips.

@willWillSmithsmith I too hope it hasn't!

I know and I totally get that (don't we all turn into one parent or another gulp) I just think so many people these days are so hung up on aesthetics and desperately using lotions and potions and god forbid injections and surgeries to hold onto their youth and we all grow old eventually ... disgracefully or not!

I just thinks there's more important things in life than a dropped jowl a grey hair or lack of it or a whisker or two on the chin!

Best quote I have ever read.

Really does put it all into perspective.
Thank you for sharing.

@Gummybear23 thank you!

I honestly didn't mean to go in so hard or get anybody's heckles up. I guess it just weighs heavily atm.

I just feel that people in general are so caught up on how they look, and how people see them these days. It's all about aesthetics. Bloody social media is to blame.

Granted when my Granny was my age she was probably already in her twin-set and pearls and dragging her hoppa behind her ... but then my Mum on the otherhand was wearing leather trousers and a crop top and going to the gym into her 60's! I think p'raps she was trying to prove a point.

I just think the social media savvy snowflakes today need to put their mobiles down and take stock of what really matters.

Step away from the mirror and if all else fails hit the gin!

Absolutely. My sigh lasts a second or two then it’s forgotten but, like others, I can catch myself in a mirror or shop window and think gawd is that me 😯 but then I just get on with my day 😁

My main problem is that my face has turned so much into my Dad's that I am now getting misgendered by customers at work. Yes, it's funny the first time. The second time you just think, Oh, FFS. By the third and fourth time that I've been called 'mate - oh, sorry, thought you were a bloke' it becomes very demoralising.

I wear a uniform that's only one step up from a sack, but I ALSO have a 36DD chest and quite a small waist, so I really am being judged on short grey hair and a face like my Dad!

I NEVER stare at myself in a mirror and never have done! It’s when I accidentally catch my reflection or the camera on my phone flips around, and for a split second I don’t recognise the old person looking back at me. I think in my case it might be a body dysmorphia thing because I have Tourette’s which comes with all kind of other fun mental health issues. I’ve always hated the way I look and I have a very clear memory of looking in a mirror when I was 6 and thinking how ugly I was, which I’m sure isn’t normal.

I’m almost 55 and don’t recognise a lot of what posters are saying. I must still be waiting for the big bone structure change to happen.

Yes, people age differently, that's normal too.

Our chronological age and biological age can also be different depending on genes, lifestyle, sun exposure, illness , stress, grief, fitness level, diet, environmental exposure (wind, snow, cold, heat) etc etc etc

Yes 😞. Our family friend who died at 38. A boy in my dd’s class who died at 16 😞.

I think it’s easy to forget sometimes. And when people are ill the things they are scared of losing are being with people they love, listening to the rain, the sun, nature, just life. Other things fall away.

I am 55 next week. I don’t find aging great but I also think “who cares!” - at the moment it is touch and go whether my 17 year old dd finishes school with any A Levels or not - for various reasons - and I am consumed with anxiety about that.

The one thing which makes me a bit sad is that I am divorced from the one relationship I was ever in - which was emotionally abusive and which ended in divorce. I am sad that it looks like I will never be in a loving relationship as 55 is not a meet people age IMO.

Sorry, I thought I had quoted the pp who said that many people don’t get the privilege of aging.

I'm 60 and the bottom of my face looks like it's melting; I take after my mother - we didn't look our age until about 55 and then it has been downhill very rapidly. Each time I have work done at the dentist I get more ridges and drooping around my mouth. It's horrible and nothing to do with trying to look stunning - I would just like not to look like Stretch Armstrong around my mouth and chin.