PEERING through hordes of Christmas shoppers yesterday, I spotted the rugged face of actor Tom Hardy.
Alas, not in real life. It was the moody, black and white advert for perfume brand Jo Malone.
The snap crops in on the 47-year-old, showing rows of deep frown lines and crow’s feet around his eyes.
My immediate thought was that his weathered mug looked very handsome indeed.
And how wise he must be with all that furrowed forehead. What a deep thinker.
But then it struck me — I looked for his female equivalent on any billboard or poster in the shops and realised there isn’t one.
Every female celebrity promoting a mascara or pair of trainers is porcelain-skinned with a forehead like a hard-boiled egg.
Where, oh where are the equals to broody, scholar-like Hardy?
There are plenty of women working in Hollywood who are older than him, yet few of them have a crinkle or wrinkle on their face.
Not a single frown line appears on Nicole Kidman, 57, Jennifer Lopez, 55, Demi Moore, 62, or Jennifer Aniston, 55.
Closer to home, our own stars like Amanda Holden, 53, Kate Beckinsale, 51, and Catherine Zeta-Jones, 55, have the complexions of freshly filled balloons.
Even Queen Olivia Colman, 50, admitted having “loads of Botox”.
All of these are extremely talented, clever, well-travelled women with decades of life experience.
Yet their biggest fear seems to be showing any of that on their face.
And while it’s always great to see women aged over 50 working on both the big and small screen, the question arises: What do older women even look like now?
It seems the only ones allowed to have a phizog that couldn’t be mistaken for an AI creation are our great dames — Judy Dench or Eileen Atkins are the acceptable face of gravity.
How ridiculous that we in the western world are just about OK with a woman looking her age when she’s . . . in her nineties.
The wave of female Benjamin Buttons do a disservice to the rest of us, who don’t have the time, money or desire to be walking medical miracles reversing in age.
This constant pressure to look youthful does not help any of us.
In fact, it does more to pit us against each other.
It makes us feel like we’ve failed by allowing our eyebrows to move or our necks to sag.
Now, at the age of 43, I often look at the laughter lines around my eyes and see them as a failure.
Even though, ironically, they mostly got there from having a great time, they now make me feel inadequate or undesirable.
As though not constantly sipping from the fountain of youth is somehow a shortcoming of mine.
And this forever-young pressure is even getting to girls in their twenties.
TikTok, which has a demographic with a maximum age of 27, has aestheticians advertising procedures such as Baby Botox, sold as “preventative” to ageing.
Pitching itself to the young as an injectable time machine, the hashtag #antiaging has more than 7.9billion total views, with those young enough to be my daughter shouting: “Girls who are getting Botox in their twenties are winning!” and, “I got Baby Botox and I’m obsessed.”
Of course, these girls don’t actually look younger.
Rather, they become like creepy carbon copies of the cast of every The Real Housewives Of . . .
Their pouty lips, arched eyebrows and frozen foreheads make many assume they’re in their fifties rather than twenties.
Dermatologist Dr Anthony Rossi said of the Baby Botox craze: “It can change the shape of their eyebrow and almost make them look older, because they can’t emote any more and they almost look robotic.”
What if we just stopped all this nonsense and became like fine wines, getting better with age?
Like well-worn Tom Hardy and his male chums.
Our maturity and life experience shouldn’t bring us shame. They should be treated as a thing of beauty.
Getting older is an adventure that brings us all wisdom and bundles of life experience.
So, let’s not be afraid to show it on our faces.
I DON’T know about your TV viewing rules on Christmas Day, but in my household it’s illegal to watch anything other than terrestrial telly on the big day.
Absolutely none of this streaming nonsense can be on the box on the 25th.
And everything must be watched in real time – no pausing or rewinding.
There is something just so warm and nostalgic about knowing the rest of the nation is watching along with you in their homes.
It takes us back to the “when EastEnders was really good” days – Ange open-mouthed in 1986 as Dirty Den gave her the gift of divorce papers and growled: “Happy Christmas, Ange.”
The whole country did a collective intake of breath in their sitting rooms.
Which is why us Brits are so excited about the Gavin & Stacey special tomorrow.
Knowing we’ll be communally laughing as one – and possibly weeping – truly is the spirit of Christmas past.
A SCARY combination of news at the weekend revealed 44 per cent of us don’t know how to set up controls on kids’ phones.
Yet, one in ten parents plan on giving their children a phone tomorrow – with 64 per cent of those kids being under 14.
All this after “brain rot” was announced by Oxford University Press as its word of the year after a public vote, amid warnings overuse of our phones is deteriorating our grey matter.
Famously, iPhone co-founder Steve Jobs limited the amount of screen time his children had and banned having an iPad in the family home, knowing it was harmful to their development and wellbeing.
Similar with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.
Interesting how these guys knew about the horrors of the addictive drugs they were creating.
They want your children hooked, but not their own.
IT’S not often I agree with anxiety-ridden members of Generation Z.
But there’s one recent cause of distress they have shone a spotlight on that I’m completely on board with: Switching on the big light.
In a video that has racked up millions of views, Australian TikTok creators Josh and Matt say: “This is why the big light should be banned.
“First of all, the big light creates such a sterile look. How are you supposed to relax in this?
“Another reason is that it makes you really ugly. No one needs to see my face in this much detail!”
Quite right.
Reaching for the big light switch is for emergency situations only – like searching for a dropped contact lens or cleaning up some spilt wine.
Otherwise, it’s like trying to relax in a hospital ward.
WHEN someone says, “I’m not really a cat person”, all I hear is, “I’m a serial killer”.
How can anyone sane not like cats? They’re just so cool.
Yep, I’m one of those dreadful “childless cat ladies” who seem to bother the American Vice President elect JD Vance and other lovers of disparaging cliches.
Never having been keen on the idea of doing irreversible damage to myself to produce something that says, “I hate you and I wish you were dead” 13 years later, I stuck to the felines.
And here are my two – Bud and Betty.
They make me smile every single day, give endless affection and don’t have screaming meltdowns in supermarkets if I don’t get the treats they like.
And while I would rather eat from their litter tray than refer to them as my “fur babies”, I have to admit that this year a few of my cards were “signed” from the three of us.
DID you know there’s an easy way to spot a psychopath?
I went to see the journalist Jon Ronson recently, talking about his bestselling book The Psychopath Test.
During it, he revealed a psycho is immune to a contagious yawn. They can happily watch someone do a ginormous yawn and stretch without feeling the urge to copy.
Test it out when your great aunt rolls out a story they’ve told before . . . and watch carefully how the family reacts.
