FOREVER YOUNG

Campaigner Katie Piper says women must come to terms with ageing out of the male gaze’. But, argues Helen Coffey, that’s difficult when celebrities point-blank refuse to get old

- Helen Coffey

"Age is just a number", goes the old adage. The new version should perhaps come with an addendum: "Age is just a number but one that your face and body should never reflect."

It was the recent words of presenter and activist Katie Piper that prompted this musing on our collective endeavour to erase the visible passage of time. “Ageing can be compared to a bereavement,” the Loose Women panellist said at this year’s Hay Festival while promoting her new book, Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space. “Sometimes we know we’re losing somebody or something, and it’s slow, it’s gradual – and when it’s ageing, we look down at our hands, we see they look different. We catch ourselves in the shop window, and everything’s changed.”

The 41-year-old’s sentiments hit a nerve. I’m 38, a mere slip of a girl, surely, and yet I’ve already started having those out-of-body experiences – suddenly seeing a photo of myself taken from an unexpected angle and thinking, “Who’s she? That middle-aged woman with the chins and the deeply etched eye bags?” Or catching a glimpse in the mirror, brought up short by the marching silver threads that can never be beaten back, no matter how often I dye my hair, because there’s always more, more, more – a never-ending onslaught of grey to remind me that I’m getting older by the day.

Piper, who has had to endure multiple surgeries to repair her face and eyesight ever since she was the victim of an acid attack orchestrated by an ex-boyfriend in 2008, has a very different relationship with her appearance compared to most of us. “Women age out of the male gaze,” she said frankly. “I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn’t just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things.”