Recently, I have started to worry about my face. Early in the morning, before the children wake up, I’m sure I can see ghosts in the downstairs loo mirror. My 20-year-old self’s face flashes before me but soon vanishes reproachfully into the crow’s feet around my eyes; I didn’t like her anyway. My long-deceased father lingers over my cheekbones and draws the smoking lines around my mouth in ash. I frown back. My grandmother, anxious, appears in the split second between posing and relaxing. I squint as she used to when playing bridge. If the past is an inscrutable face, I am reduced to reading, not between the lines but between the wrinkles.
I never thought I would get old – I’m 43 – but it’s happening. Admittedly, my lizard-like love of the sun and devotion to fags hasn’t helped. I once spent an entire month in Provence lying on a riverbank with no SPF on and smoking Gitanes sans filtre. That’s some skincare regime. Mercifully, a new buzzword in beauty has appeared, and it suits me down to the last frown line. ‘Old Money Face’ is an active rejection of Kardashian beauty optimisation and the reviled 2D ‘Instagram Face’ retrofitted by plastic surgeons after AI taught us to edit ourselves through filters on a phone.
