your particle board IKEA wardrobe tends to age
less well? I think there are lessons we can take
from this: when something is well made from
authentic sustainable materials it really can
become more beautiful with age. Yes, we simply
have to accept that our physical attractiveness is
different as we get older. From our teens to our
forties we have evolved to be driven by the
instinct to reproduce, whether it is conscious or
not. Youthful faces and bodies can be heartwrenchingly beautiful and they inspire
sexual desire. I’m afraid there is no
getting away from that. A recent article
by Andrew O’Hagan in The New York
Times T Magazine in praise of older
women’s beauty was hilariously
undermined by the accompanying
photographs of actresses Marine
Vacth (23); Lea Seydoux (28) and
the positively ancient Berenice Bejo
at 37. The visual accompaniment
arguably suggested the polar
opposite of the content of
O’Hagan’s piece, that the beauty of
older women has greater depth
than that of younger ones. But if
you look at the captions to the
photographs we see that they
helpfully provide a shopping list
for the clothes and jewellery
being worn by these undeniably
beautiful young women. Beauty
and sexual desire sell consumer
goods. Older people are not
only much harder to sell with but
to sell to. We've been there and done that and
now we want value for money. Using sex to sell
to the boomer generation just doesn’t work so well
because, if we're going to part with our hardearned money, the product will have to have
something more to recommend it. Oh and the
ability to connect what the advertisers are
promising with real life experience helps us to
make more discerning judgements too.
So, to get back to my furniture analogy, how do
we make a life that is authentic and sustainable?
What can we do to make our later stages of life
meaningful and pleasurable? Again, we have
never been privy to so much information that we
can use to create a road map for our later years.
Research into what have been called Blue Zones,
areas of the world where people enjoy not just
longevity but extremely high quality of life, might
help us here. There was no consensus about one
Diet & Health Today
particular diet – high carb, low carb etc. but there
was one common dietary factor – they ate real
food. Now where have we heard that be