A few days after it appeared, I bumped into the artist — a lovely bloke — in the lift well of our offices and he asked me what I made of my likeness. I stared at the floor and mumbled. He said, in an awkwardly leading manner, ‘I really like doing people I work with, as I can capture them so well.’ There was a pause before he added: ‘You don’t need to have plastic surgery or anything.’ Oh.
Since then, I have no longer been surprised when random strangers comment on my nose. I once walked into a kebab shop and the proprietor greeted me with: ‘Aah, you have a French nose! Ha! What would you like to eat?’ (By French, I understood she meant more Gérard Depardieu than Emmanuelle Béart.)
My nose is not monstrous, but it would not last a week in Hollywood. Should I care? Sometimes I do, and if it was made of playdoh instead of bone and gristle, I admit I’d try to push it in a little, on the sly. I know, we are all ‘before’ shots now, even the conventionally beautiful, and it’s increasingly rare to see the face of a prominent person that is untouched. You only have to walk into the change room of any gym, pool or surf club and you can view the human body in all its resplendent ordinariness, the kind you will very rarely see on screen.
It’s as though ageing is a little . . . embarrassing, unkempt and sloppy. We shame women, especially as they grow older, tabloids zooming in mercilessly on veined hands or knobbly feet. But we also shame them when they too obviously try not to age. When fillers are too fresh or lips too puffy, when faces look bland and temples tight, we throw pellets of scorn — at women like Renée Zellweger, Kim Novak, Liza Minnelli and Donatella Versace.
Of course, many prominent women have pricked and inflated and tortured their faces precisely because of the aforementioned criticism of women who show their age. That’s what happens when you inhabit a galaxy where wrinkles are a sign not of maturity, but of carelessness and lack of money. It’s as though women must both be perfect and mask any striving to that perfection — any sign of straining, or of work, incites contempt.
A vast crowd of people claiming to be surgical Rumpelstiltskins now skim wealth from women’s insecurity like fat off broth, while offering little more than homogeneity. Indeed, it’s not surgery that is the problem for the famous faces we gaze upon now, but sameness: the centripetal force that eliminates all ‘irregularities’, all signs of distinctiveness, resulting in uniformly stretched eyes, plumped-up cheeks, ironed foreheads and fully baked breasts. Just ask Jennifer Grey, the Dirty Dancing star who lost her distinctive appeal and her career when surgeons shaved her nose down to a more conventional shape.
Perhaps it is time for all of us to trumpet — or at least not try to mask — our imperfections. History is replete with hugely inspiring people who would never have been asked to prance along a Victoria’s Secret runway, and wouldn’t have wanted to. Think of some of the women! The magnificent Eleanor Roosevelt had buck teeth. The brilliant social worker and campaigner for women’s rights Jane Addams thought she had a ‘lumpy’ nose. Mexican artist Frida Kahlo had a monobrow and a moustache. The famed US documentary photographer Dorothea Lange had a limp. Pioneering US chef Julia Child was an impressive 6 feet 2 inches tall. So was Margaret Whitlam, who was always self-conscious about her height and told the ABC, ‘I thought of it as being unfortunately too tall . . . I suppose I was about thirteen; I can remember a picture of myself in my going-skiing gear — and I do look like three yards of pump-water.’ The writer Daphne Merkin described the fabulously stylish doyenne of postwar fashion Diana Vreeland as having the ‘face of a gargoyle’.
Then there were the monarchs. Egyptian ruler Cleopatra had a hooked nose (French scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that if her nose had been shorter, ‘the whole face of the world would have been changed’). Catherine the Great looked — as recently claimed — like Britain’s former prime minister, David Cameron, in a white wig, yet her perceived plainness did not prevent her from procuring a line of youthful lovers.
Male figures from history can inspire in the same way. Former US president Abraham Lincoln, who was widely considered to be an unattractive man, charmed people with his lack of vanity and pretension. His law partner wrote: ‘He was not a pretty man by any means, nor was he an ugly one; he was a homely man, careless of his looks, plain-looking and plain-acting. He had no pomp, display, or dignity, so-called. He was a sad-looking man . . . His apparent gloom impressed his friends, and created sympathy for him — one means of his great success. He was gloomy, abstracted and joyous.’ He also achieved remarkable things.
A CONSEQUENCE OF UNIFORMITY for women — and, increasingly, men — is erasure of character. It seems trite, or retro, to remind ourselves that beauty is warmth, conversation, intelligence and a certain grace or magnetism, too, but it’s true.
Part of the difficulty is that we see allure as simply static, something that can be captured and shared on a flat surface. Our social media imprints have narrowed the definition of beauty to what can be photographed, filtered and posted; and that has resulted in the neglect of charm.
Charm is often absent from selfies, portraits and even statues. When, in 1919, the editors of the Arts Gazette ran a competition for the ugliest statue in London, writer George Bernard Shaw proposed several of Queen Victoria while arguing that these unflattering, stout, solemn figures did her a great disservice. He wondered what crime the by then deceased monarch had committed that she should be so ‘horribly’ portrayed ‘through the length and breadth of her dominions’. He lamented that, although Victoria had been ‘a little woman with great decision of manner and a beautiful speaking voice which she used in public extremely well’ and ‘carried herself very well’, ‘all young people now believe that she was a huge heap of a woman’.
Cleopatra’s true allure was charisma. Plutarch wrote that her beauty was ‘not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it’. Instead, ‘the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching’. Who cared, then, about her nose?
Australian author Elizabeth Jolley described female anxiety about appearance perfectly in her novel The Orchard Thieves. She wrote of a grandmother watching a group of young women prepare for a party, wondering why women only ever concentrated on isolated flaws, never
the whole person, the general effect of the complete person . . .
Women only ever saw themselves in flawed fragments, she wrote.
‘They were always conscious of the physical fault, the extra chin, the wry mouth, eyes too small or too close together, a flat nose, an ugly nose, fat legs or legs which were too thin and had no shape, lifeless drab hair, the list could go on, and they never, these women, they never saw serenity in their own expressions because of the anxiety reflected in the last-minute glancings in mirrors. The eyes they saw were forever worried and accompanied by small but deep frowns . . . And, in any case, it was not the physical details or the clothes and the accessories which mattered most. It was the personality which made the difference between being badly dressed and well dressed.
The red carpet is a cruel carnival. When camera lenses capture the merest of shadows, the photos are quickly parcelled into timelines of decay that shout a cautionary message: if you cannot be, and remain, visually pleasing, then hide. But surely there are enough of us who recognise that we are more than the sum of our fragmented parts. After all, superficial beauty is only a partial, poor prophylactic against the ills of the world. The sublime Academy Award–winning actor Halle Berry told a group of reporters in London in 2004, when she was promoting Catwoman: ‘Being thought of as a beautiful woman has spared me nothing in life. No heartache, no trouble. Love has been difficult. Beauty is essentially meaningless, and it’s always transitory.’