Eye of the Beholder: On Ageing, Beauty, and the Weight of the Mask

To show your bare face today, online, in public, under the merciless scrutiny of the camera, is considered radical. What was once ordinary has become an act of defiance. Eye of the Beholder, a chapter from my series The Other, begins here: with the paradox that authenticity has become a performance, and that the absence of glamour can feel more transgressive than its excess.

This series ask what ageing means in a culture where beauty is currency, and where women’s value is so often equated with appearance. It challenges the glossy industries that profit from insecurity: magazines that warn against wrinkles, cosmetic empires that promise eternal youth, apps that filter our faces into something smoother, lighter, sharper, “better.” Behind each promise is the same threat: that time is the enemy, that change is loss, that only by hiding can we be loved.

I don’t see makeup, fashion, or even surgery as inherently wrong. They can be powerful forms of self-expression. What troubles me is when they stop being choices and become obligations. I’ve felt that quiet pressure myself: the sense that without the “mask,” I might be judged, diminished, dismissed. That without the armour of beauty, I’m not quite enough.

The metaphor of the mask runs through this project. Makeup, surgery, digital filters: these can all be tools of play, but too often they become compulsory disguises. They conceal not because we want to experiment, but because we fear rejection. The mask is not the crime; the coercion to wear it is.

This tension is not new. Naomi Wolf’s landmark book The Beauty Myth argued that as women gained ground socially and politically, the pressures of beauty only tightened their hold. The flawless ideal became another mechanism of control: a set of impossible standards that women chase but never reach, a form of unpaid labour that drains energy, time, and confidence. The myth tells us that beauty leads to happiness, love, and success, and so the pursuit becomes endless, the disappointment inevitable.

And yet, cracks are appearing in this edifice. Pamela Anderson’s choice to appear at major public events without makeup ( something unthinkable for her in the height of her celebrity) has resonated widely. Her gesture is not about rejecting beauty altogether but about reclaiming the right to be seen as she is, without mask or stylist, without apology. Jamie Lee Curtis, too, has spoken of the “genocide on natural beauty” caused by surgical interventions and Hollywood’s fixation on youth, insisting instead on a pro-ageing stance: to see ageing not as failure but as wisdom, vitality, and life itself.

Even cinema has entered the conversation. Coralie Fargeat’s recent horror film The Substance takes the obsession with youth and perfection to grotesque extremes, portraying a woman literally consuming her own younger self to stay desirable. Its violence and absurdity only exaggerate what many of us already feel beneath our daily routines: the slow cannibalisation of the self in service to an impossible ideal.

If this conversation feels newly urgent, it is because women are ready for change. Ready to shed the mask not out of neglect, but out of choice. Ready to claim beauty on our own terms: as expression, not oppression. Ready to embrace the truth that ageing is not decline, but transformation.

Through Eye of the Beholder, I imagine futures where authenticity is not considered brave but ordinary. Where beauty is an invitation, not a command. Where the eye of the beholder finally learns to see beyond the mask, and we learn to see ourselves with the same freedom.