Aging
Losing Your Looks
Personal Perspective: Loss of youth and beauty is a bonafide loss.
Posted February 3, 2025 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- It’s good to focus on inner beauty and aging well, but not at the expense of an honest accounting of loss.
- The downside of hating to lose your looks is hating to look at your own self in the mirror.
- The loss of youth and beauty encourages a reevaluation of what success in life looks like.
My mother once told me that you can tell what you looked like ten years ago by lying on your back on a bed and looking up into a mirror, and what you’ll look like ten years from now by lying over the edge of a bed and looking down into a mirror.
I mentioned this at a party once, and a woman listening in said, “That’s it. I’m never going to be on top again.”
My own version of this dispiriting little exercise takes place in the bathroom mirror. It began in my late 20’s when a switch flipped in my genetic command center and alerted my hair follicles to pump out an enzyme by the painfully appropriate name of reductase, which began pouring into the roots of my hairs, stunting their growth, shortening their lifespan, and marking the premature arrival of that depilatory scourge known as middle age. What were once thunderheads have slowly and unavoidably become wisps of cirrus flitting irresolutely overhead.
Tilting my head down in front of the mirror, I look into the past; tilting it up, with the light streaming in from a window behind me, I see into the future, and it looks like a tire low on tread.
On bad days, I try to console myself with the usual rationalizations: Inner beauty is more important than outer beauty; I'm only as old as I feel; at least I have love, health and a sense of purpose; I'm still attractive for my age; think how much money I’ll save on shampoo; at least I'm balding like Jack Nicholson, William Hurt and Bruce Willis.
But just as often I find myself tired of calling misery spiritual growth, or trying to elbow past it by arguing for the merits of love, health, meaningful work, and the fact that I’m not alone in this and at least it happens slowly. In these moments I actually find greater comfort in admitting that the loss of youth and looks is a bonafide loss, and I’m allowed to treat it as one.
Sorrow and grief, that is, are appropriate responses. It’s fine to count your blessings, but not at the expense of an honest accounting of loss, up to and including the one the aging process inevitably points to: the fact that you have a use-by date, and will be forced to relinquish all the powers you’ve inherited or spent a lifetime building up and clinging to.
We’ve all bought into the Beauty Industrial Complex, which tells us that young is good and old is bad. But ironically, as we age our vision becomes clearer, and we begin to make out the small print—in our wrinkles and sagging skin, our liver spots and receding hair, our increasing preference for low lighting, and our vampiric avoidance of mirrors; in today’s bad photos which will be tomorrow’s good photos.
In her book Older, Wiser, Fiercer, Carol Orsborn describes the early stretches of aging as the most difficult. “You still believe that if you just try hard enough, you can stop the more serious effects of aging from happening to you. But only when the irreversible losses begin setting in and it is clear there's no turning back do you become a candidate for serious transformation.” And that entails “a more authentic relationship to life,” which includes a rigorous reevaluation of what constitutes success in life, and what other people think of you.
The two are joined at the hip. The central tragedy of our obsession with youth and beauty is the defining of achievement (and acceptance) as something external to us, believing that it’s not how we feel about ourselves that matters, but how other people feel about us, and that self-esteem is just unicorns and yetis until it’s authenticated by the greater authority of other people’s attention and recognition, which makes it real.
The truth is that most people are too busy worrying about what we think of them to really care all that much about us. Studies of what’s called the spotlight effect (in which you overestimate the amount of attention you’re getting), show that people pay about half as much attention to us as we think they do.
Granted, caring what other people think of you—social acceptance—is an evolutionary adaptation, but to focus on getting attention—whether for your looks or your achievements—is to focus on what only other people can give you. Thus the flip side of craving people’s attention and approval is living in fear of the power they have over you and of their judgment, though it makes a kind of brutal sense to crave it anyway if you look inside for validation and don’t find any.
Which is likely to get worse if you hate losing your looks (by which I mean any physical features you’ve been pleased to possess: your face, hair, skin, teeth, figure, physique, etc). Because then you’re going to hate looking at your own self in the mirror, hate yourself for being human, and that is definitely going to make it harder to grow old gracefully. Is trying to make peace with aging and mortality any more difficult or disheartening than living every day body-shaming yourself?
Certainly, getting older is better than the alternative, which is not getting older, and working to accept the loss of youth and beauty is better than the alternative, which is being glumly resigned to it, or outright miserable. Besides, you never really lose your looks. You know exactly where they are—in the past. And constantly mourning your fading looks consigns you to living in the past rather than the present.
Should you live long enough, though, you may get an assist from the aging process itself, with its onset of that blessed developmental stage in which you simply don’t care so much anymore what other people think of you. My mother insisted it was one of the great and liberating benedictions of getting older, so it is something to look forward to.
Meanwhile, the life-giving thing is to live life to the fullest even in the face of its most literally self-defeating forces, to keep wholeheartedly building sandcastles while fully aware of the incoming tide. And to do this not in order to be liberated from fear or disappointment, not to purge yourself of sadness or suffering, but to more passionately embrace life in all its discommodious glory.
Some years ago I ran across a scene in one of those TV hospital dramas in which a man is being told by a doctor that his beautiful young wife has breast cancer that will require a double mastectomy. The man is inconsolable, and can’t conceive how he’ll ever make peace with this horrible change (in his fortune). The doctor stands up, walks over to his bookshelf and takes down an album of before-and-after photographs of women who’d undergone mastectomies. He opens it on the coffee-table in front of the man. “What you do,” he tells him sternly, “is look at these photographs over and over and over until you are no longer repulsed by them.”
Teaching ourselves to embrace what we learned to fear is not for the faint of heart, but as I stand before my bathroom mirror these days—as I stand before myself—I hope that I’ll allow myself my lamentations, redouble my efforts to squeeze everything I possibly can out of life, and leave it the same way I entered it—bald and complete.
And when this life is over, I hope to be reunited with my loved ones, and with my hair.