I Needed to See These Beauty Icons of the 70s and 80s Who Didn’t Mess With Their Faces

My brain needed a reset. Does yours?

Photo by Gustavo Fring from Pexels

I am sorry to say, but I blame this on one image of one actress that completely set me off. I was scrolling through Instagram in June when my eyeballs landed on a photo of the three remaining members of the And Just Like That/Sex and the City crew, linking arms on the roof of a building in Brooklyn. The rest of the photo faded into the grey skyline of New York City in the distance, but holy shit on a stick–what the hell, Charlotte?

Before you think I am going to rip another woman for her divergent choices in facial rejuvenation, I will inform you that this is not that kind of party. I am not going to be some kind of Plastic Surgery Karen who thinks they have the right to say one thing about what it takes to be an actress of a certain age today. I am only going to say that this photo made me as mad as a hornet.

It’s no one’s fault, but it’s everyone’s fault. I know this because even I went through a crisis when I turned 45 and suddenly couldn’t bear to look at my skinny turkey neck on one more FaceTime call. After the neck, I started seeing the bubble nose that recalled my ex-boxer grandfather, the “elevens” between my eyebrows that made me look permanently ripshit, and the uneven lip line where gloss seemed to slosh over the edge and bleed out through the surrounding tributaries.

I know that this is normal aging. Yet, somehow, I got the idea that there was something decidedly abnormal about it. Then I remembered that I hadn’t seen a single face age naturally since probably before the Clinton administration, so what did I expect? Every celebrity since then has done some kind of alteration to their face to the point that we don’t even know what real faces look like anymore. Worse, we expect them to do it now and get a visceral reaction when we see faces that don’t look they’ve been sucking down shots of hyaluronic acid with a Botox chaser.

I needed a reset. I needed to look at faces that made sense before everyone started getting whacked by drive-by filler, so I did some research. Do you know how hard it was to find women who I remembered as being beautiful, but who hadn’t eventually caved into face futzing? It was…