a 60 years old Miss Universe, Mother Gothel and Marlene Dietrich met in a coffee shop
but they all got green tea because it's rich in antioxidants.
When I read that Miss Universe 2024 was 60 years old I couldn’t resist but being enthralled by the news. To start, I realised the news I had first found on the internet was not complete. In fact, it wasn’t Miss Universe 2024 but Miss Universe Buenos Aires 2024. So as of today, Miss Universe 2024 has not been elected yet and so we don’t know if she will really be 60 years old –only Miss Universe Buenos Aires is. I didn’t know that every city elects its Miss Universe to compete nationally to then compete to the World Miss Universe pageant –which in spite of the name, only features Terrestrial women. I don’t really understand how the word “Universe” and the name of a city can go together and make sense, but I have accepted that words mean absolutely nothing. Images don’t mean anything either –out of curiosity I googled the first Miss Universe I found on the Wikipedia Page of the pageant for the year 2024 and her photo looked like an AI image circulating on a bot-infested viral page on Facebook–but I digress.
I was asking myself what does this victory mean for all of us? A slow news day, perhaps? No, not just that. It also means that women are beautiful at all ages! As long as they look ageless, of course, otherwise they’d better go back to their dark cave. I mean, what does “beautiful” even mean anyway, if everybody is supposedly beautiful, right? Remember The Incredibles? “Everyone's special, Dash.–Which is another way of saying no one is.”1 That’s why I am always a bit suspicious of the urge to distribute the label “beautiful” to everybody as a fundamental human right –especially women. There are so many other things one can be that do not involve obsessing over your mortal coil. But these things are not the ones we will be discussing today, so let’s get back to the shiny and the frivolous.
A news found on the internet is never complete without reading the comments of the common people at the bottom of the article, so I obliged. Commenters were divided in Yay-sayers and Nay-sayers, just like in the UK House of Commons2. The Yay-sayers were just going along the lines of “good for you” and “looking good”. The Nay-sayers were fundamentally grounded in the Rapunzel and Snowwhite trope of the old hag who wants to desperately look young forever in order to receive undeserved attention and love. Traditionally in folktales and fables there has always been something sinister and suspicious about old women magically looking nothing like their age.
It always struck me how Marlene Dietrich looked like in “A Touch of Evil” at 56 years old: uncanny and flawless. It is rumoured she was doing temporary cosmetic facelifts on set with the help of tape3 and hair pins.4 I personally noted that she often had a strong light on her face, sometimes to the point of overexposure, and that her close-up portraits were mostly out of focus5. A modern Facetune if you like, only on fancy black and white film instead of the IPhone Camera Roll and with expensive cinema lights instead of a cheap Amazon portable beauty ring for Youtubers.
Well, if looking young was only a matter of lighting and filters on a virtual avatar, things would be way easier (and cheaper!). Back then, in fact, not much else could be done. But today a number of things can be done, therefore a 56 years old who looks like a regular 56 years old is not doing everything she can. There is a whole new vocabulary in skin care and body care used to say unpleasant things in a pleasant way. We can’t say ageing is undesirable for women anymore, so we talk about “ageing gracefully”, “doing what makes you feel good”, “being at ease in your own skin” and “looking like yourself again”. The main message is unchanged, but it now sounds so inclusive and positive!
A 56 years old should look like a 30 years old at best in order to “look like herself” again, so it only makes sense in this apocalyptic scenario that Miss Universe Buenos Aires 2024 looks 35 at worst. (Gosh, that’s a long title. Let’s call her MUBA from now on). And while “the whole world walks on its head”6and old women age backwards, on the other side of the spectrum 20 years olds are now looking like 40 years olds because of premature botox –as weird and fun as it can get.
The main problem is that even if today a 60 years old can look 30, her internal organs are still 60 years old and she won’t get to live an extra 30 years on top of her life expectancy. There is no way around what’s inside of you, we are all inevitably decaying and shutting down in the end.
It reminds me about the movie “Death Becomes Her”, where the two women protagonists get into a bit of a bad deal in order to look young and beautiful forever: they lose the chance to die. So when they go through accidents that would have killed any regular human being they are stuck to be alive forever –with a broken, decaying body that needs constant embalming and retouching. It’s a very silly movie with so many narrative holes and unanswered questions (the main one being “why would Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn fight over that specific version of Bruce Willis”), but it resonates so well with our current never ending maintenance of the appearance of youth by the means of localised injections, removals, additions, whitenings, tightenings, fattenings, slimmings, etc. An appearance that is simply that –an appearance. The word comes from Latin “ad parere”, to bring forward (and nobody cares about what is left behind).
All in all, it needs to be said that I could not find any evidence that Ms MUBA has either a husband nor children, which statistically speaking gives her a strong advantage for a happier and healthier life as a woman. There was a book a while ago, “Happy Ever After” by Paul Dolan, mentioning how studies show that unmarried and childless women are the happiest people. He was quoting a study by ATUS and turns out he got it completely wrong. Not that anyone cared –in fact the book has been published and most articles talking about the book stand uncorrected on the internet.7 I’ll admit it, I really wanted to believe Paul, mostly because of my anecdotical evidence of biographies of great celibate women. I am sad that Paul has been proven wrong by data –what he said sounded so instinctively true.
Kids do age you though. In the movie “Madeline”, Sister Clavel tells little naughty Madeline, exasperated: “You make me grow grey hair”, and she immediately replies, all excited: “Can I see them?”.8 Fortunately for her, Sister Clavel did get married with Jesus and not with a guy who doesn’t even know how to start the dishwasher–imagine that.9 Sister Claver was also lucky because nobody was allowed to see her grey hair, and that must probably feel quite liberating. At the end of the day, nothing is more liberating than not being constantly “seen”, “looked at”. Being allowed to just “be” without being “seen as”–“beautiful” above all things. That’s what I wish for us all.
Why quoting Nietzsche, the Bible or Marcus Aurelius when you can just derive all your sententiae from pop culture?
Unfortunately, this was a poetic licence I took. The Nay-sayers at the House of Commons simply say No –therefore they are No-sayers, technically. They should be saying Nay though. Why don’t they? I hate this world.
Sounds familiar… See Linda Evangelista’s comeback September 2022 Vogue cover. She was only wearing headgear that completely bound her face and all excess skin was brought back by tape by the make-up artist. Linda herself said this in the Vogue interview, so no tips or spies on set.
And that’s pretty much all one can note with a degree in Photography. Please kids, go study something else, aspire to become someone. I am joking! –Am I?
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1980)
Madeline, Daisy von Scherler Mayer (1998).
As in cleaning video “POV You Left Your Husband in Charge for Two Days” by Micah Enriquez.