Terry Prone: I get Botox not to look younger but to continue looking like myself
A column appeared on these pages last week that mentioned Botox — and I took issue with it (not the writer, that’s important), but we’ll come back to that.
First, though, a visit to Carlow and a question you could be asked only in Ireland. My visit to the Visual Arts Centre, Carlow, was to an event featuring Age-Friendly ambassadors such as actor Geraldine Plunkett, at which a woman came up to me and asked if I’d be pictured with her group.
Sure, I said, moving into position. All the women in the group, she said, loved me on the afternoon television programme.
They nodded in unison. Then came the question: “Who are you, exactly?”
Nobody would ask that question anywhere but Ireland, where we specialise in knowing what people are but not who they are.
It isn’t meant to humiliate, but it does cause any notions you might have to faceplant right there. I offered my name. They all enthusiastically confirmed that I’d got that right. The picture was taken and compliments passed between us, although one of the women asked me in a condemning way how I walk in four-inch heels. With some difficulty, I told her, which seemed to make her happy. If I was lapping along like a rabbit, it would, I think, have made her somewhat dismal.
The compliments didn’t include telling me, admiringly, how old I look. When you’re in your 70s, people would be entitled to say things like “love the dress,” adding, warmly: “God, you look so old.”
Isn’t it funny, though? Invariably, they eschew that option. Nobody ever praises anybody of any gender for looking old. They just don’t.
It’s not a widely-owned aesthetic objective as a result, because everybody knows looking older may be — indeed, certainly is — one of life’s inevitabilities.
But as a goal, it’s not high on the priorities of those getting on in years. It’s a bit like Woody Allen’s comment that he’s not afraid of death, he just doesn’t want to be there when it happens: We all know we’re going to look old, but it’s not a cheery rite of passage like a visit to Center Parcs — although, in fairness, it’s cheaper.
Without exception, the outward and visible signs of ageing are described in all media in pejorative terms. The captions refer to “purse-string lips” and “turkey neck.”
Understandably, then, when alternatives present themselves, those alternatives — such as Botox and fillers — do well.
I have written on this page about my most recent facelift, and listened to the usual comments from the “grow old gracefully” brigade who are horrified by the idea of having work done. The usual comments mainly focus in two areas. The first is the freak outcome.
This is where the commentator points to the worst possible examples of plastic surgery going seriously wrong, as if it were a surgically apocalyptic punishment for getting above yourself and not going gently into the dark night of age.
The other area is a misunderstanding which is overdue for some correction. Critics of Botox and fillers state fearlessly that their users want to look younger. It ain’t necessarily so. If it were, Botox and filler users would not happily confirm their use to anyone who asks and to several people who don’t.
They know that neither makes them look younger. They want to keep looking like themselves.
What Botox and fillers do is take away the least-likeable visible signs of age. If ageing just meant osteoporosis, grey hair, and over-enthusiastic eyebrows, that would be fine. Well, maybe not fine with the osteoporosis, but there again, if you get your injections, eat dairy, and get a kettle-bell, you can be reasonably optimistic on that front.
But the interventions everybody (according to the Irish Examiner opinion poll) thinks everybody else is getting leave us, as individuals, pretty much the same as we always were.
The things Botox and fillers deal with are the things that change us into someone else. In my case, an oul’ sourpuss. Pull down the sides of your mouth, as gravity does, and sourpussery is an immediate consequence. A little filler just under the corners of your mouth, however, corrects gravity and puts you back to cheerful normality.
Same with frowning. Over time, if you concentrate hard on life, the universe, and everything, you get frown lines between your eyebrows and look permanently cross. Note that word — cross. Not old.
Now, a small but vocally virtuous cohort maintains that they cherish their every wrinkle, including those between the brows, because they earned them, but that cohort needs to be disregarded.
They’re the shower who talk about wearing purple and apparently feel it meritorious to look as if they’re permanently pissed off at life, the universe, and everything while wearing purple.
I don’t want to look constantly aggravated because it would not reflect the reality of my life. I’m irrationally happy, most of the time.
If I had looked constantly mad as hell when I was 50, it would have falsified me. Ditto now I am 75. But when I get Botox to inhibit my frowning, it is not that I believe it will make me look 65.
I’m still going to look 75 when the injections are complete, but I will not look as if someone has ruined my 75-year-old day.
Now we get to Jennifer Horgan, columnist of this parish, who on Friday provided Irish Examiner readers with a delightful excursion into the irreverent celebration of the dead by past generations of Irish people who drank, screwed, and practical-joked their way around death. Having been told stories by my mother of her as a child visiting the homes of total strangers to have a gawk at the dead one, the Horgan evocation of past attitudes and behaviours seemed spot on to me.
But then she went on to suggest that “people having Botox might be better off drinking and having sex around corpses”.
I’m a broad-minded person, always up for new experiences, but I’m not sure the evidence is there to suggest me drinking and having sex around corpses would do much for the purse-string lines threatening my mouth. Jennifer, however, suggests that my problem might be what she cleverly dubs “death anxiety light”.
This would be fear of death as a motivator to have work done, to look your best, look less tired, cover up, or reverse the signs that you’ve been there, done that — indeed maybe have done too much of that. I disagree.
Botox, for me, isn’t a fingers-crossed gesture to ward off death.
It’s just a way of avoiding ending up like the balloon you find under the stairs a fortnight after the party, all shrunk and dispirited.
But disagreeing with Jennifer Horgan doesn’t mean needing to be hostile toward her. I never miss Jennifer’s column, always enjoy it, constantly learn from it — and this week, disagree with it. What’s the problem?
