The lights at the Saks Fifth Avenue beauty counter were surgical-theater bright. The decree, decisive: “You need to lose the cat eye.” Trinny Woodall, notoriously unfiltered founder of Trinny London, assessed me with a glance. “Clearly, you haven’t changed your makeup since you were in your 20s,” she added. “Remember, you’ve aged.”
How could I forget?
Woodall’s cosmetics line has drawn a cult-like following among her target audience of women over 40, and her brash persona is part of the sell. On Instagram, she rants to 1.5 million followers about everything from her undereye bags to her hemorrhoids, and her tough-love beauty makeovers can be either empowering or withering, depending on your disposition. Me? I got the full Trinny.
She struck out my winged black liquid liner and rounded my eyes with a smudged pencil the color of burned toast; contoured under my cheekbones and jaw with bronzer; applied an impasto of shimmery taupe eye shadow (the shade: Wisdom) to my lids; dabbed a matte mauve on my lips. Then she stepped back.
“Much better,” she declared before leaving me with my reflection. But wait: Was it my reflection? Gazing back at me in bewilderment was the face of a middle-of-the-road, middle-aged woman, significantly older than I perceive myself to be.
I went home and washed everything off, but the memory was indelible. I began to spiral. Is my makeup, like a Hello Kitty backpack, no longer age-appropriate? I have been doing the liquid-eyeliner and red lipstick thing since college. I’ve also had the same haircut since 2008, which makes me feel uncomfortably like Margaret Thatcher, but without the hairspray. Have I been seeing a younger version of myself in the mirror while the rest of the world registers me as a cautionary tale about the perils of midlife highlighter? Is my face mutton dressed as lamb?
Is it possible that I’ve been seeing a younger version of myself in the mirror while the rest of the world registers me as a cautionary tale?
The truth is that we may never know how we appear to others. According to various studies, about 60 percent of American women believe they look younger than other people their age. If you do that math, somebody’s fooling herself somewhere. Plastic surgeons and dermatologists use the phrase “perception drift” to describe what happens when we lose sight of our faces after fiddling with injections and scalpels. It’s reasonable to suppose that a similar phenomenon can happen with makeup, only with a mirage of our younger faces superimposed over the reality of our life-battered mugs.
I salute Woodall’s mission to cater to Gens more seasoned than Z. (Her products are pretty good, too—the Plump Up moisturizer has joined my rotation.) And I’m not averse to taking the advice of makeup maestros. The Sephora employee who told me that my eyebrows—no kidding—had “kind of a sperm shape,” and showed me where to fill them, deserves my gratitude. But the suggestion that I had outgrown my makeup stung, not least because it felt so joylessly prescriptive. To butcher T. S. Eliot: when it comes to preparing my face for the faces that I meet, I don’t want to be told how to do it. Some age-related rules make sense—avoid spackle-like foundation and lipstick apt to bleed into wrinkles—but once our faces are ballpark A.A.R.P.-eligible, must we lose things that have always made us feel like us?
“It’s not like women who have had the ability to put on makeup beautifully all their lives get older and are suddenly struck dumb,” says Sarah Creal, who developed Victoria Beckham’s makeup line and whose namesake brand addresses the needs of over-40 faces while still feeling cool. “I’m not here to inveigh on whether someone should dye their hair pink or wear bright eye shadow. We can do whatever we want. That is beauty.”
There’s a woman I remember from my childhood, a friend of an elderly relative. She had a cloud of white wispy hair and must have been in her mid-80s, but I never saw her without lavender lids, swirls of pink blush, and bright coral lipstick. To me, she did not in any way look like someone foolhardily attempting to reverse the clock, but rather like someone who refused to relinquish delight. Even as a kid, I loved that.
And here’s a fun fact: The phrase “mutton dressed as lamb” originated as praise for older women, not condemnation. It appeared in an 1811 journal of gossip by Mrs. Frances Calvert. “Someone the other day asked the Prince of Wales whether he did not think some girl pretty,” Calvert wrote. “‘Girl!’ answered he. ‘Girls are not to my taste. I don’t like lamb; but mutton dressed as lamb.’” Mutton, at that time, was considered a superior piece of meat. Lamb just happened to be served with a bit more flair.
If it’s ever said of me, I shall relish it.
April Long is a New York–based writer and contributing beauty editor at Town & Country
