Videos keep popping up on my social media apps, tutorials to disguise my hooded eyes. Yes, I’ve noticed them too, in the mornings and in pictures where I’m smiling but something looks different. The hooded eye, they call it. It came for me.
This is a problem the internet wants to help me with. And all the influencers on it. And the tips and products that they sell.
I can’t stop my face from being 47. My hooded eyes rat me out. I notice the names they delineate to our development: crow’s feet. Sun damage. Laugh lines are now called parentheses. As if my mouth is now enclosed, non-essential information. What’s essential to know is the aging that’s happening around it. Beauty tarnished. Invaded. Expiring.
Is it the Grim Reaper coming for my eyes—the hood of death? Death to the power of beauty, the power of femininity? Of the ability to be seen? Perhaps I will like the discretion the hood provides. The disruption even, to that raw, alluring power. The pivot that wrinkles offer, testifying to the power of story. It’s there on our faces.
All the signals that I ignored before are manifesting. The little lines forming around my lips reveal that I am an anxious person. They tell on me, saying “Look at this, you chew your lips all the time!” Wow, I never realized it. Always thinking myself as easy-going, and here I am eating my own flesh. I’ve been nervously consuming myself for years, and now there are grooves in the path my mouth contorts to make it so.
The lines of much laughter are there. Enclosing my mouth, framing my eyes, jetting out like fireworks. All the years of laughing. I’m proud of these.
But I didn’t expect the underneath. Underneath my mouth reveals lines of criticalness. All the harsh judgment of others. It’s there on my face now. Yes, I see those little curves under my mouth. They’ve crept between, too. Between my eyebrows. I see you and I repent.
The burdens I bear have formed dark pillows for my eyes to rest on. They are fluffier in the mornings, giving my eyes time to wake up. I dutifully attempt to conceal them every day. Others do not need to know these burdens. They can only be trusted to be seen and held by a few. Of course, you see them anyway, concealed burdens trying to behave themselves.
All the expressions over all the years, right there on my forehead. I remember people used to tell me that I had a very expressive face. I now look at women my age with smooth foreheads thinking of all the visages they held in over the years. Or perhaps injected.
Perhaps I will try the lid hack offered by these influencers. Perhaps when I do, I will believe that it will tell a different story. That something as simple as make-up can hide what the face demands.
“Videos keep popping up on my social media apps, tutorials to disguise my hooded eyes.”
Really? I get baby animal videos and Spanish Christian pop music. Plus Spanish ads for cell phones. I think the Eye in the Sky heard me asking the universe (and the IT professional in the next room), “Why won’t my phone send a text?”
Thank you for this! It makes me think of a song by my big sisterâs band, She Mob (she is the lead singer). Apparently âBotox Partiesâ are a real thing.
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It’s weird how I’ll sometimes catch a look at the present me sometimes when I’m shaving or combing my hair or just pass a mirror unawares in a store somewhere.
I usually don’t bother looking too closely in mirrors, and my brain just tells me I’m seeing the same face I’ve always seen over the past 30–maybe 40–years. Then the unplanned viewing takes place, like changing the depth of focus on a microscope to see the inner workings of a cell.
Wrinkles I’d not been noticing stand out in bas relief. Skin color variations from decades of exposure to the elements parade next to each other from forehead to cheek to neckline. Scars from basal cell cancer removals that I’d thought faded to oblivion appear almost fresh and new under this unexpected scrutiny.
Then I think: this is the face I’ve earned. It took me years to get it and I hope to honor it for decades to come. Wrinkles, blotches, scars, and all.
Now, can you do a post on hair color, Aimee? I’d like to talk about graying.
A wonderful piece on aging. I am 48. My face has changed irreparably, the little lines and fuller jaw, dry face patches, grey hair underneath the box dye.
I don’t really look at myself in the mirror anymore because I feel like a stranger. I know that I have abandoned myself over the past years dealing with intense stress, and the body does keep the score!
Thank you for this poetic and deeply thoughtful writing.
Somebody smart told me that “we aren’t loved because we are beautiful we are beautiful because we are loved.” So the best beauty secret is to avail ourselves of His love and just bask in it twice a day. It’s good skin care.
It’s also kind of amusing how our eyesight tends to fade around the same time. I actually now just have a soft blurred glow in the mirror and it looks much like an Instagram filter, LOL!
The realism here made me laugh (in a good way): “I can’t stop my face from being 47.”
But, as your post highlights, the world offers us many ways to give others (and ourselves!) the allusion we’re years younger.
Even as a 32-year-old male, I find myself lamenting the “losing” or should I say “maturing” of my face which is happening slowly but surely (vitiligo, wrinkles, bags, etc.).
I think there’s some relation here to what the Preacher says in Ecclesiastes about God placing eternity within the heart of man.
We were meant/created to live forever with God. Yet because of the fall, we often misplace this rightful longing by seeking to eternalize the present and temporal—those things which are actually mercifully passing away as we await the NE & NE and even the redemption of our bodies which, for all in Christ, will one day be raised up and glorified.
So, I think I agree with you, Aimee—our faces do indeed tell a story, stories worth telling. Some of which we’re proud of, some which we regret (as you allude to in the post); and yet the inescapable reality that the outward man is passing away coupled with our longing for eternity points us to the greatest story of how the Son of God made us, redeems us, and indeed promises to make all things new.
So even as our bodies bear marks of life lived in a fallen world, we can take heart with grace to press because of what God has done for us in Christ:
“Since we have the same spirit of faith according to what has been written, “I believed, and so I spoke,” we also believe, and so we also speak, knowing that he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus and bring us with you into his presence. For it is all for your sake, so that as grace extends to more and more people it may increase thanksgiving, to the glory of God.
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.
“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor 4:13-18).
I know you’ve given a lot more thought about these matters than I have based on some of your more recent writing projects, but I do pray that these half-baked thoughts of mine—and, better yet, the Scripture itself—might prove to be edifying.
Welp. The good Lord knew I needed this little boost today. I’m edging into 48 this month, and I notice more and more that I’m becoming the women who have made me – Wanda Mae’s laugh, Mary Evelyn’s jaw and neckline, Susie Q’s gray, curly hair, Mama Sementilli’s deep set eyes. The laugh lines are settling in nicely next to the headache lines and worried mouth puckers. My face is a map. I’m trying to decide if I should buy that stupid face tape, or if I should just let the women in my family tree shine through me. I like the latter best today. We are His poema…
Nature? Nurture? Culture!! At seventy, my mental image is still my younger very in shape rugby playing, 400+ bench pressing body, in spite of what I see in the mirror. That’s my internal image.. in spite of the reality of knees that protest on stairs a little bit (not enough to cause me any real trouble–yet?).
And guys can get away with a lot; I’ve always preferred a mustache; now I’ve added more disguise, and vacillate between a neat trim that creates a false impression my face is more elongated to counter the spreading girth of this no longer young and trim body; taking care to groom my beard toward a scholarly look; or alternatively, I adopt the vagrant, gruff, mind of its own look of the New England sea captain fresh from the storm -where the wildness dominates, with hair on my head looking storm tossed, and each individual hair on the sides of my face choosing its own independent directions.
What a fun diversion this has been, this morning, from the more serious stuff. thank you!