Just Let Us Age

I am tired of being told that aging is something we should be trying to outrun. Reverse it. Erase it. Correct it. Tighten it. Lift it. Prevent anyone from knowing it happened. At some point, can we just let women age?

I’m not talking about giving up on ourselves. Quite the opposite. Take care of your skin. Feed it well. Moisturize it. Protect it from the sun. Move your body. Eat beautiful food. Get your sleep. Wear the lipstick. Use the face oil. Do the things that make you feel good when you look in the mirror. But maybe we could stop asking all of those things to make us look younger.

There is a difference between caring for ourselves and trying to erase ourselves. And I think we’ve blurred that line.

I love skincare. Obviously. I’ve spent years creating it. But I don’t believe the purpose of skincare is to keep your face frozen at 35. Skin changes. It gets drier. It gets thinner. It loses some of its bounce. Lines settle in places they didn’t used to. The face looking back at you changes because you have changed. That isn’t a skincare failure. That is being alive.

And yet we are surrounded by an industry—and increasingly a culture—that keeps pointing us backward. Look how you used to look. Look at this old photograph. Look at your jawline then. Look at your eyes then. Look at your body then. It feels like spending an awful lot of our lives looking in the rearview mirror.

And I keep wondering: What are we missing right in front of us?

Because this version of me is here now. This face. This body. This life. And she deserves my attention too.

I don’t want to spend my 50s wishing for my 30s, only to arrive in my 70s and realize how young 54 actually was. I want to be here for it.

There is something freeing about deciding that youth is no longer the prize. Health is. Vitality is. Curiosity is. Feeling comfortable in your own skin is. Being surrounded by people you love is. Still wanting to learn and make things and cook dinner and sit in the garden and laugh until your stomach hurts is. A face cannot tell you whether a woman has those things.

Maybe graceful aging isn’t about preserving what was. Maybe it’s about caring beautifully for what is.

So yes, take care of your skin. Love the skin you’re in enough to care for it well—not because you’re desperately trying to make it look like the skin you had twenty years ago, but because this skin belongs to you now.

And perhaps instead of constantly asking how we can look younger, we could start asking a much more interesting question: How do I want to live as I grow older?

That feels like a future worth looking toward.

Just let us age. I think we might actually be quite beautiful at it.

- Natalie