On Beauty, Fleeting

It would seem that there is a dramatic abundance of beautiful women wandering the planet these days. And it would seem that women -- girls -- are looking older and more beautiful than their ages would indicate. I write today from a location in the world where there seems to be a disproportionate number of extremely gorgeous women, and a thought struck me that I wish to share.

What goes through the mind of a woman as she sees herself cresting that peak in life where the skin is not as elastic as it used to be? When freckles begin that long, slow morph into age spots? When she no longer turns the heads of men of all ages? Is it more difficult for a woman to face that time when she had spent her life to that point as a strikingly beautiful woman? Is it any easier if she had been more plain? Or does the plain jane suffer worse as she has never had the adoration of the physically endowed, and now she slips into agedness just like everyone else so that what she DID have now begins to elude her as well? Is it better to have had and lost than to have never had at all, or the other way around?

As a man who was never physically attractive to the general population (and if I was, I wish somebody would have let me in on that secret!), I slide into middle age with ambivalence. I was never dashing and handsome, so I don't see those ebbing away. I was never the star athlete -- or any kind of athlete, for that matter -- so I have no glory days as such to look back upon, nor the demise of same to mourn. I generally regret that I never had those things, and I don't think the level of regret will increase with age.

I think it must be different for women, at least in American society, where so much emphasis is placed on beauty and appearance, if only in the most practical sense. When the days of primping and polishing are over, when no amount of make-up seems to make a difference, what does she do with her time? But more deeply, what did time do with her? Does she look in the mirror and think back to the days when her skin was smooth and tight, when her lips had no wrinkles at the edges, when wrinkles formed at the outer edges of her eyes only when she smiled?

Or is this something we will all do at some point in and after middle age, whether we had "it" or not?

I don't want to get old.


dassall