Her Majesty’s Grace: The Last of a Generation?

To mark the recent passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Royal Family’s official Twitter account posted a video remembering the late monarch. It featured a timeline of her growing up and then ageing throughout her life.

Aside from being a touching tribute to Elizabeth, it’s difficult not to notice her natural beauty and the way in which she embraced it. As the wrinkles and greys crept in over the years, she showed them off with a smile, without any apparent desire to hide or remove them.

Growing into maturity, she became a grandmother figure to many across the Commonwealth and embraced the role with dignity and humour. We never saw her desperately clinging to her youth like some form of perpetual Peter Pan, or trying to fight against what nature dealt her, and she seemed perfectly happy for it. For a woman, especially one so publicly viewed and scrutinised throughout her entire life, such decorum is now unfortunately a rarity. 

We have, as a species, become increasingly afraid of showing signs of ageing. We pour resources into attempting to halt or even reverse the process. While some of the research may be valuable in helping to cure or prevent age-related diseases, many consumers are motivated by an inability and unwillingness to face the uncomfortable subject of human mortality and thus strive to remain forever youthful. 

When it comes to the fairer sex, the stronger coupling of youth with fertility, and by extension the ability to attract a mate, seems to make the desire to appear young even all the more prevalent. Women all too often wind up labelling themselves and each other as failures for not managing to defy nature in successfully staving off the ageing process with plucking, dyeing, tucking, filling, and hiding their faces behind layers of makeup.

As perhaps both a cause and a symptom of this, we find ourselves increasingly bombarded with imagery of so-called “beautiful” people. From the subtle war the average woman wages with her greys in the mirror, through to the countless images on social media of faces whose wear and tear have been obscured by filters and make-up; to the extreme examples of international celebrities who have undergone so much plastic surgery in an effort to remain youthful that they barely remain looking human. Everywhere we look are people who refuse to age.

It’s saddening to think that this is the imagery the younger generations will see of older adults, a generation of  ‘mature’ people parading themselves around with alienesque faces while pretending not to be a day over 25 rather than presenting the realistic, healthy version of graceful ageing as the Queen did. It is tragic that the young may, as many already do, feel in the future that there is something wrong with them, or each other, if they fail to follow their elders in preventing themselves from looking worn by time. 

More saddening still is to realise that we’ve lost one of the few role models standing with dignity in the public light as nature made her. 

Now, as we begin the process of phasing her face off of our currency to make way for King Charles III, we are left only with the filtered and plastic faces of ageing celebrities. The world seems a little worse off because of it.