Sia: Something a little different. A piece I ran across today and it made me wonder if women DO need any plastic surgery and what others might think of it? My thoughts on it are below the article...

How Much Plastic Surgery Does a Woman Really Need?

“I was around 45 when I started noticing that a line between my brows had become a crevasse,” writes Mimi Swartz. (Mark Peterson/Corbis via Getty Images)

Here’s the thing about being an older woman: You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. So you might as well please yourself.

By Mimi Swartz - 06.01.25 — Weekend Culture

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our new Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, Emily Yoffe wrote about letting go of ambition. Today’s essay, by Mimi Swartz, explores a fraught subject: plastic surgery in your 70s.

When my 79-year-old mother lay unconscious in a San Antonio emergency room, the nurse attending her had some questions. Mom had taken a bad fall while walking her dog on a 100-degree morning in August. Her condition was critical: One side of her face was midnight blue, and X-rays showed her neck was broken; she was “nonresponsive” after being resuscitated by the ambulance attendants. The nurse was moving around Mom’s body in a tiny room, taking a medical history. Attendants had cut off most of her clothes and draped my mom in a sheet. The nurse wanted to know the usual stuff. Age? Previous illnesses? Current illnesses? Finally, she asked about prior surgeries. I answered “none,” forgetting in that fraught moment that my mother had had both knees replaced in her 60s.

I had also forgotten something else. The nurse, a pretty woman with dark hair, had been gracing me with a deeply sympathetic gaze, but with my last answer she looked at me as if she thought I had misunderstood the question. Silence descended. She waited.

“Oh!” I said, finally tuned in to what she was seeing under the sheet. Yes, there had been other surgeries. The breast reduction(s), the tummy tuck(s), the face lift(s), the varicose vein eradications, and more. It had been decades since I had seen my mother naked, and I wondered just how many surgical scars were visible on her failing body that lay prone under the sheet. When Mom died a few hours later in the hospital, her face was as firm and unlined as a 30-year-old’s, which meant that it was firmer and less lined than my own. I was 56.

This is a story I sometimes tell with a laugh to explain my mother’s passion for—or was it an addiction to?—cosmetic surgery. I feel like a rat relaying it again here, even though my mother has been dead for a dozen years, and even though anyone who saw her late in her life could tell that “a little work” didn’t begin to cover all she’d had done. “It’s hard to be sympathetic to your mom’s ailments, because she doesn’t look her age,” my husband said once, referring to her battle with painful osteoarthritis and her perpetually shaking hands caused by a condition known as essential tremor. I bought this observation up to a point, though rather than looking youthful, I felt that after so much surgery, Mom had come to resemble so many women of a certain age who don’t exactly look younger, but thanks to advances in cosmetic surgery, just look more like Cher than Dame Maggie Smith. They have what my husband calls “that face.”

When my mother’s face became “that face,” I swore I would never have one, and made my friends swear they would never let me have one. Never a needle, and certainly never a cut. But that was then.

I think I was around 45 when I started noticing that a line between my brows had become a crevasse. My mother had warned me this would happen if I kept frowning, and now, there it was. At about the same time, a friend—there’s always a helpful friend in these scenarios, isn’t there?—told me she had a dermatologist who was really great with something called Botox. This was 25 years ago, when “procedures” were still sort of a secret, around the time Nicole Kidman’s smooth, unlined face became mysteriously expressionless on-screen. I went to see Dr. L., who spent a few minutes clucking happily while injecting a diluted form of the toxin that causes botulism between my brows. Within two weeks, once the Botox kicked in, I no longer looked like a middle-aged woman exhausted from juggling a career, motherhood, and marriage. I looked, instead, like someone who had never had an occasion to frown in her life. I handed over what was, to me, a small fortune, and made an appointment to come back for more in three months.

And I asked myself: Was I turning into my mother? I’d already heard—only half-jokingly–that Botox was a gateway drug.

One of my most resonant childhood memories in San Antonio is of sitting at my mother’s dressing-room table, which was framed in lights like a Hollywood star’s. Beneath that brightly lit mirror was a perimeter lined with foundations, mascaras, brushes of all sizes, and lipstick in every conceivable shade. The drawers beneath held a chaos of hairpins, hair clips, and curlers: many, many curlers. My mother also had antiaging skin creams long before they were cool: tubes, bottles, and sprays, all of which promised miraculous if dubious transformations. And there were hairpieces—on-trend falls in their era, and later, wigs. Short pixie ones and then later long, thick ones. I would say that my mother was never afraid to be beautiful.

My mother was a creature of her time and I was a creature of mine—first the hippie decades of the 1960s and ’70s, and then of second-wave, bare-faced, hairy-legged feminism. Doing nothing in particular to enhance my face or my body was both a political statement and an impeccable form of rebellion against my poor mother, who for many years wondered why I didn’t seem to want to, in her words, “fix myself up.” I was okay with looking just okay. Though I was pleasantly surprised when I got to college on the East Coast and discovered my long dark hair and dark eyes had an appeal that had been undervalued by the boys in my Texas high school.

I was ambivalent when my mother started enhancing herself surgically sometime in the early ’80s, after she turned 50. It wasn’t until she started getting fat injections in her hands, supposedly to make them appear younger (they didn’t), that I realized something had gone awry. Before that I could excuse a lot; of course Mom would get a breast reduction after three kids and terrible back pain; of course she would get permanent eyeliner and lipstick because of her tremor. My mother was also an artist who, thanks to that tremor, moved from painting and sculpture into computer graphics in her 60s, making collages of women in peril—a Victorian woman eyeing a noose-like frame, a wooden maiden with an English country house on fire behind her. In her spare time, she adjusted family photos more to her liking. She slimmed down my former sister-in-law’s thighs in a group portrait, one small reason she may now be a former sister-in-law.

In short, my mother had a passion for, and a passionate belief in, transformation, and because she was not a person open to criticism, no matter how gently it was offered, my brothers, my dad, and I let her do her thing if only to keep the peace. I told myself that her difficult childhood, or her perception of it, colored her sense of self. If she thought she could bring herself happiness from the outside in, fine. But I wasn’t going to be that way when I got older because, well, why would I need to?

You are just like your mother can be one of the most powerful epithets on the planet, but the experiences of aging have made me, like many of my friends, more forgiving of the woman who raised me. I’m grateful, for instance, to have inherited a fraction of my mother’s discerning eye, even if mine is lazier and less extravagant due to a lack of funding. But it also means that when I looked at my middle-aged face in my (unlighted) mirror, I started to see the creeping droop of my grandmother’s jowls, jowls that I never, ever saw on my mother. I wish I could tell you, too, that when I look at my aunt’s deeply lined, 94-year-old face, I think she’s beautiful—well, I kind of do—but instead I’m just mostly glad that I took my mother’s advice and stayed out of the sun. That alone has probably saved me a fortune with Dr. L.

Even so, my spending increased exponentially when I hit my 60s and he introduced me to what is known among the cognoscenti as “fill.” Restylane, as it is more commonly known, contains what is a natural derivative of streptococcal bacteria, but 15 minutes of injections from the cheerful Dr. L made me a convert. Gravity was vanquished, and unlike with Botox, there was no waiting for results. I had the jawline of a 28-year-old in the time it takes to blow up a balloon, which is kind of what getting filler is like. Since then I have tried the Fraxel laser to eliminate brown spots, a procedure known as Thermage that is supposed to restore collagen, and probably a host of other things I have forgotten, including an eye job that was covered by insurance because my right eyelid had drooped low enough to serve as its own pirate’s patch. Still, I am happy to report that I do not look like Kristi Noem’s big sister, just an older woman who looks like she gets enough rest. No one tells me anymore that I don’t look my age, which is 70. I look like what some might call “a good 70,” but still, 70.

Even so, aside from the procedures, I have become a total sucker for the antiaging products hawked on Instagram, most of which are very expensive, promise everything, and do little to nothing. I have so many that I don’t let strangers in my bathroom—yes, they are all lined up at attention under my mirror like you know who.

Almost every day I marvel at how precisely the algorithm targets the secret fears and desires of women my age. Just as 15-year-olds get targeted for pimple patches and push-up bras, my nighttime Instagram scrolling offers an endless compendium of the indignities of old age and the ways to avoid them. It’s a lot: There are products to prevent hair loss (including for eyebrows and eyelashes), and medieval-looking toe braces that supposedly prevent bunions. There are exercise plans to eliminate sagging thighs, sagging breasts, and sagging buns, and pelvic-floor videos to assist with decrepit gyno-urinary systems. (Where are the men? In another, much smaller algorithm, I assume.)

So how did Ms. Hairy-Legged-Natural-Look fall down this rabbit hole?

I have wondered about this often, especially since my husband has never once complained about a wrinkle, much less a sag, and thinks the whole artificial enhancement phenomenon is ridiculous, a sentiment shared by most of my friends’ partners. I’ve fallen prey to a debate limited to and directed at women, mostly, and, as usual for women of any age, the messages are contradictory.

The pressure to look younger remains indisputable, and not just in ads and among the famous. If you are, like me, still working, it means you are surrounded by adults old enough to be not just your children but your grandchildren. It isn’t good to remind colleagues of their nanas; asking for help signing into Slack will likely cause them to wonder why you aren’t on an ice floe. You’ll want to do what you can to at least project outward competence in the machinations of the twenty-first century, if not youth.

In contrast, there is the Pamela Anderson self-acceptance route. “As soon as I took the mask off, the whole world opened up,” she told Better Homes and Gardens. Pamela Anderson is 57—only 57, I would say—and has the bone structure of a Nordic goddess. There is a small category of beautiful women who remain stunning all their lives, and she is one of them, thanks to lucky genes and, most likely, a phalanx of assistants who made sure her beauty was preserved decades ago. (How many zillions of gallons of sunscreen were lathered on that face during Baywatch filming?) Also, she’s admitted to having had work in the past. So of course Anderson looks good in middle age. So do women in their 30s who have started on Botox early to avoid the dreaded “wrinkles and fine lines” later. The only difference is that no one makes fun of them for their preservation efforts. For younger women, it’s just part of a beauty regimen, the one that ranks preservation over self-acceptance.

I’m a rank amateur compared to my mom, but I have come to understand how she felt as she came closer to the end of her days, as I have come closer to mine. Here’s the thing about being an older woman: You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Whether you look like Cher or Dame Maggie Smith in your old age, shame and humiliation are still built into the system. You are going to be discarded and dismissed unless you have the kind of power that Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher had, so you might as well please yourself, even if pleasing yourself has to do with trying to look 45, or 55, for as long as possible. (I’ve read those studies that claim people are happier with their appearance as they age; tell that to Instagram.) Maybe my mother could have been more circumspect, or more immune to social pressure. Maybe that is my work to finish.

Still, I haven’t been under the knife in a long time and doubt I will again, despite being envious of older friends who can shell out the price of a fully loaded Subaru Crosstrek to get a full face and neck lift and look perpetually middle-aged. It’s just too late for me. I dread the aftereffects of general anesthesia, and besides, I know my husband loves me as I am, in the way my mother never believed my father did or even that anyone could. That’s progress, of a sort.

And you know what? It’s nice to feel pretty once in a while, even as a latecomer.

Mimi Swartz is a staff writer at Texas Monthly.

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Sia: I think that whatever someone (male or female) wants to do to their own body is perfectly fine IMHO. Still, some go way too far in my estimation. Some take what I consider foolish risks in an attempt to stave off every sign of aging as if looking a little younger actually makes them a little younger.

Your thoughts?