The Cost of Beauty at 40

by Cate Meredith

There are four things women need to feel beautiful and preserve the illusion of youth into middle age: good hair, straight white teeth, clear skin and a fit body. Unfortunately most of us were not genetically blessed with all four of these things, so we must buy them.

Good hair requires scrupulous maintenance. You need a good cut, which for some reason now costs $175, but even a perfect cut is meeting only half the daily beauty requirements. Grays pop up overnight, and if you want to keep your chestnut tresses looking untouched by age, you splash down $85 every three weeks for a touchup. Some women who have been brunettes their whole lives dye their hair a nice ashy blonde, a discreet concession that they’re way too busy — and probably too broke — for the exorbitant cost of keeping up dark hair. My shampoo and conditioner cost $24 each — that’s fifty bucks every two months just to clean and condition it. Boars hair brushes ($30), hair dryers that claim to be non-damaging and non-drying ($200), straighteners ($30), curlers ($30). I spend it and never — not once — have I ever come close to having Gisele Bundchen’s naturally perfect “beachy waves.”

Skin is by far the easiest to fake with products, and possibly a bit of surgery. The minute you wake up in the morning, you slather on your SPF 110. The mere kiss of sunlight on your cheeks could result in irreversible sun damage! Breathless ads in every beauty magazine say so.

I have pretty good skin, partly because slathering on the sunblock is second nature to me now. When I was a teenager, I was in love with Robert Smith of The Cure and wanted my skin to be as ghostly and alabaster as his. To get that look, I smeared sunblock on my face even when I was indoors, lest a micron of sunlight leak from behind the curtains and touch my face. The habit stuck. Fortunately sunblock isn’t too expensive.

I have not yet succumbed to fillers, but I’ve done my research. I know that a Botox shot only costs $300 and takes around thirty minutes. I keep that factoid in the back of my mind, but so far keeping up my skin consists of tons of liberal application of sunblock, daily applications of Renova, and wearing hats when in direct sunlight. At the age of 35 I began to use Renova, a prescription Retin-A product. It’s $200 a tube and lasts four months. It dries out your skin while making you poreless, spotless, soft and smooth, so you also need a high-quality moisturizer. I spend $125 on Skinceuticals Daily Moisturizer, along with a whole slew of serums, eye creams, lifters, smoothers, brighteners and oils. So my “easy” skin care routine costs roughly $1,800 per year.

I had my teeth fixed about ten years ago. They weren’t terrible, just a little blah. (Yes, see, you can have blah teeth!) I had a crooked incisor that I wanted to get fixed, and I also wanted to try Zoom, the teeth-whitener system to the stars (or so I read in US Weekly). The cosmetic dentist assured me she could shave eight years off my looks just by applying a little bonding and the Zoom teeth whitening. I was sold — at the price of $1,700. Oh, plus a gum lift, a procedure in which the dentist scrapes away part of your gums, imparting a “more even” overall appearance. I didn’t ask how much time that might have subtracted from my face (six months? It was worth it!). However, it did add $700 to the bill. By this time, I no longer cared about the money. I just wanted all that sweet, sweet youth and beauty promised to me.

The most difficult part of upkeep is the physique. A 40-year-old body is harder to maintain than it was in previous years so I try more things to help keep my shape. I’m constantly looking for new sports to try. Rock climbing improves your balance and arms. Spinning classes are necessary: nothing gets fat off faster than HIIT workouts. I also must take barre classes because I want the long, lean look of a dancer even if I spent the previous 39 years with the short, round look of a cabbage. And if I really want that agile and lithe look, I need yoga classes. Each one of these classes is $18 and I have to take them at least twice a week or my body won’t respond. In that case, my fitness level would be as entropic as my bank account. So using beauty-math, it seems like it saves me money to take more classes.

The payoff should be a tight, toned, flexible body emanating youth, strength and fitness. And sometimes, that is exactly what I get. I rejoice in the subtle definition of my quadriceps muscle, entertaining the thought of wearing a skirt that perhaps shows just the tiniest little sliver of thigh when I’m brought back to earth by the fact that my stomach still pokes out just a bit and I really need to take an extra barre class to get that sorted out. No thigh skimming skirts for me until my tummy is in good enough shape to pull it off.

That’s how it works though — you start to feel just okay about one thing and then your attention is directed to something else that makes you feel bad about yourself, and thus you increase the barre classes to five a week. What difference, you ask yourself, is $40 more per week?

After you’ve already spent $400 that week on your classes — do you really want to undo all that work with a garbage diet? Of course not. So anything you crave is automatically forbidden. A big sandwich, a seasonal pumpkin spice latte to help get you in the mood for November, even an extra bite of kale are all off limits. You feel in a constant state of deprivation, and this feeling of hunger feels virtuous. In what other context is deprivation a sign of success?

It’s all paradoxical. We hunger, we exercise until we’re sick, we spend money on fillers, enhancements, lifts, and then turn around and say we refuse to be victims of the male gaze. We want the good parts of being beautiful — the ego boost, the illusion of eternal youth — and we hate the bad parts, like the fact that beauty can invite harassment, and that since white women earn more on average than African American and Hispanic women, we are more able to spend more to upkeep these ridiculous notions of beauty. That feeds into the vile and racist notion that only white, thin women can be truly beautiful.

Women are so very weary of this stupid game, and yet we play anyway. Our ego kicks us in the teeth when we look in the mirror, and we don’t think about the plight of other women, or society as a whole. We just know we must fix our blah teeth.

Getting into middle age pushes you farther down the ladder in terms of your beauty privilege. It’s a blow to the ego not to turn every head the way you did half your life ago, so you spend more money in the hope of reclaiming your beauty. All that spending further depresses our economic power for important things, like buying a house or investing in the stock market. Women already earn less than men so why are we spending our money on something so ephemeral, so ultimately meaningless? All the crazy things we do for beauty just create a bigger market for these things. Those who succeed, however, become even more beautiful, and that’s how we get unrealistic beauty standards.

Cate Meredith is a novelist and freelance writer. You can follow her on Twitter @cate_meredith.

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