Actress Pamela Anderson's beauty looks, from her 20s, 30s, 40s and current no-makeup look in her 50s.Illustration by Photo Illustration by The Globe
“Anti-aging is a lie,” Pamela Anderson declared to Glamour magazine earlier this year. “We’re getting older no matter what.” At 57, Anderson is experiencing a career renaissance (what the internet has dubbed the “Pam-aissance”) that she herself seems genuinely surprised by.
A revealing 2023 memoir plus a Netflix documentary about her life, and, more recently, a pivot into the food world (her first cookbook, I Love You: Recipes from the Heart, lands in October) have all helped reshape public perception of the former Baywatch star. But, for many middle-aged women, it’s her noticeable decision to forego traditional beauty trappings while she’s in the spotlight that has been the real watershed moment: Here’s a woman whose fame has been largely defined by her bombshell appearance, who is now opting out of makeup and unapologetically showing her wrinkles and other signs of aging.
But, as Anderson recently told Dazed, it took her a few years to get to a point of acceptance. “This has been such a vulnerable journey in public,” says Anderson. “We put so much pressure on ourselves to look like people that we see in magazines and movies. … I think imperfections are much more interesting.”
Anderson is one example of an aesthetic shift toward a less-is-more approach. In the 30 years she’s been practising, Toronto-based plastic surgeon Julie Khanna has seen the pendulum move away from the too-tight, overpulled and overfilled Real Housewives-esque face to something more subtle. “Now my middle-aged patients are asking me to do less,” says Khanna. “They don’t want to look like they had anything done, and they don’t want extremes.”
Many celebrities, such as Anderson, have been vocal about that decision, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Maya Rudolph and Kim Gordon. Brooke Shields has a book devoted to sharing her thoughts about aging being published next year called Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old. And in an ironic turn, Hollywood will be exploring the darker side of aging while female in several films releasing this fall.
Maya Rudolph arrives at the premiere of The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy on Feb. 20.Richard Shotwell/The Associated Press
The trailer for The Substance, starring Demi Moore as an aging Hollywood star turned fitness guru, asks ominously: Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? And in the movie Skincare, Elizabeth Banks stars in a semi-true tale that chronicles the rise and fall of a celebrity esthetician struggling to stay relevant in an industry that prizes youth and beauty. It’s a story that Banks, who, at 50, is the same age as the character she’s portraying, could easily relate to. Anderson’s own return to the big screen happens to be as an aging Vegas showgirl in director Gia Coppola’s new film, The Last Showgirl.
Amid this clash of narratives defining women as we age, popular comedian Amy Sedaris recently posted a picture of herself from a glam Harper’s Bazaar photo shoot with a caption that simply read: “I like that I look my age.” She’s 63. But what is 63, or even 50, supposed to look like in 2024? According to Los Angeles-based celebrity facialist (and avowed skin-care minimalist) Joomee Song, we have no idea.
“We have definitely lost sight of what an aging face actually looks like,” she says. If we are to believe the many memes comparing Golden Girls actresses to Jennifer Lopez, a host of interventions (olive oil, which Lopez has claimed in the past is key for her lineless complexion) means that to be fiftysomething, which the Golden Girls characters were all supposed to be, is dramatically different now than in decades past.
Vanessa Lee, a celebrity medical aesthetic provider and founder of The Things We Do in L.A., a beauty concept bar that offers injectables, facials and holistic dermatology services, has seen a similar shift too. “When I first started 15 years ago most of my patients in their 50s and 60s wanted to focus on augmentation and altering their natural features,” says Lee. The current buzz around the “no-Tox” movement is coming from women looking for treatments that play the long game, instead of offering immediate gratification.
“My patients now ask for more preservation or restoration of their own features,” says Lee. “They still want to slow down the aging process, but they want to look like themselves.” When it comes to treatments, that has meant an uptick in biostimulating procedures such as platelet-rich fibrin matrix injections (said to use growth factors in blood to boost the body’s natural tissue healing process) and Sculptra (marketed as stimulating collagen and providing gradual volume), and less frequent filler (only once every few years, says Lee).
New York-based dermatologist Jessica Weiser, whose practice has always taken a more reserved, skin-first tactic, has also been doing a lot of dissolution of excess filler. One trend report from the Aesthetic Society – an association of plastic surgeons around the world – found that in 2021, its members performed 57 per cent more filler reversals than the year before. For Weiser’s high-profile, middle-aged female patients it’s about less filler and more collagen stimulation, which she says is the key phrase in her practice right now.
“Deeper collagen stimulation to improve skin tautness and more superficial dermal stimulation for texture and light reflection,” says Weiser, who adds that Solawave (an ultrasound-based firming device), radiofrequency microneedling and lasers top the request lists. “My patients are still working against the signs of aging, just in a more subtle, natural way rather than changing or distorting facial anatomy,” she adds.
And we have more examples of that kind of distortion than ever. When it comes to aesthetic tweaks, social media has shown a clear picture of what people don’t want to look like. “We are all seeing a lot of bad work,” says Song. “A tight, puffy face isn’t a youthful face.” The internet will cite Madonna or Chrissy Teigen as examples here.
An overzealous approach to Botox and fillers can also upset the face’s natural balance, says acupuncturist and doctor of Chinese medicine Sandra Chiu of New York-based Lanshin Clinic. Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), she says, “looks at a larger holistic picture of why our face is doing what it’s doing as you age so you can address the roots and not stop it, but slow it down,” adding that how our skin changes as we age is a reflection of our internal changes.
Her widely viewed social-media tutorials on gua sha espouse its lifting, firming and depuffing benefits, and suggest it as a non-invasive approach (along with facial acupuncture) for addressing the signs of aging, one that better aligns with the principles of TCM. And many of Chiu’s followers are interested in the path of least intervention; as one wrote in a comment under a popular post of hers: “Cheers to everyone embracing their original face.”
But we don’t have an easy road map for embracing that original face as we get older, and women in particular are trapped in a catch-22. “Men are allowed to age gracefully but we’re not,” Khanna points out. The aesthetic may be shifting but the underlying message is the same: Age is something to correct, not accept, and to “age well” can require money, time (often both) and effort.
Many women spend nearly the first two decades of their lives desperate to be older, feigning older age, pining for it, then, at some point – and I’d argue that point is getting earlier thanks to the wave of Sephora tweens already panicking about fine lines and wrinkles – that shifts. For my six-year-old daughter, age is of critical importance – in fact, she’d be livid that I didn’t qualify that she is actually 6¼ – but for me, at 45, I sometimes feel it necessary to conceal my own.
And in the decade between 45 and 55 when, thanks to a tsunami of hormonal changes, aging is often suddenly accelerated, the visible transformation in what we see when we look in the mirror can be jarring. Part of aging, no matter what path you choose to address said aging, may be a process of radical acceptance: Your face will never look the way it once did, and that’s more than okay.
“As women get older they don’t feel like they look like themselves because your own internal picture is when you were at the peak of your firm-skin years,” says Chiu. “But when you overdo it with the cosmetic work you get a face with fewer wrinkles but it’s a different face. You don’t get your face back.” Trying to recreate a carbon copy of your younger face is a futile pursuit, one that, it seems, more women, high profile and not, aren’t interested in devoting the money, time and, most importantly, the effort to. Granted, celebrities are making these decisions about how they want to age from an extreme point of privilege and access, but the path they choose is also, arguably, subject to that much more scrutiny.
Aging gracefully, or sussing out what that even means, is something we all will have to face. As for Anderson, she’s said she’s focused on just being happy with herself right now; that’s some anti-aging advice we could all probably use.