My mother recently attended the funeral of an acquaintance. In true Irish mammy fashion, she relates these outings with a detour through the family tree of the deceased: “Her youngest was great friends with your older brother when they were in play school ... a very clingy child.” This woman – let’s call her Janet – was always a great beauty, my mother tells me. At 80 she was still handsome – a face you would stop to look at on the street. Janet, it turns out, was striking even in repose. My mother describes how elegant she looked, laid out – like a much younger dead woman. “An ageless beauty,” she pronounces.
While I draw the line at worrying how I’ll look in an open casket, I’m not immune to the allure of ageing gracefully. It’s the promise behind the peptide serum I bought last week without knowing – at all – what a peptide is. It’s an ideal I see presented more and more by luxury brands. Joni Mitchell channelling chic Americana for St Laurent, Joan Didion a kind of cerebral restraint for Celine. Actresses like Meryl Streep, Iman and Helen Mirren also embody what it means to age gracefully.
Inspired by this “ageless beauty” trend, my personal ambition is to look like Olwen Fouéré when I’m older – elegant, sharp, a little formidable. Never mind that Fouéré has the cut glass cheekbones of a Celtic Goddess and mine are procured with a contouring crayon clutched in my fist. I won’t look like Fouéré in 20 years, any more than I’m going to wake up at 60 and suddenly play the trumpet.
“But seriously, Mum, you don’t look that old,” my eight year old told me last week apropos nothing. (Why? When did he learn that looking old is bad?). “You don’t look 40. You could pass for ... 38.” A devastating pause as he takes me in, slumped on the couch in my pyjamas “ ... 39” Ageing is so undignified.
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Mirren agrees. “I’m not ageing gracefully at all. I hate that term,” the actress said last week, when asked to reflect on turning 80. “We just do grow older, there’s no way you can escape that. You have to grow up with your own body, your own face and the way it changes.”
I think – somewhat unkindly – that it’s easy for the genetically blessed to dismiss our anxieties about ageing. By refusing to entertain the concept, isn’t Mirren simply refusing to play a game she has already won? And isn’t that what beauty, youth and elegance is all about? “Graceful ageing” is code for look good, but don’t try hard; accept decline, but discreetly correct it; grow old, but make it luxury. It’s the kind of grace that takes a lot of free time and even more money.
“It’s not always easy but it is inevitable.” Mirren says of the ageing process. “You have to learn to accept it.” Or not. While many in the entertainment industry aspire to the sort of “natural” ageing that takes a top-notch aesthetician, a billionaire class has emerged who want to conquer age entirely.
Jeff Bezos has poured billions into Altos Labs, a research institute working to halt or reverse the ageing process. Peter Thiel – who else? – is a patron of Aubrey de Grey’s LEV Foundation, which aims for “longevity escape velocity”, adding more than one year of life expectancy per year of research.
Recently Thiel donated more than $1 million to the Methuselah Institute with the goal of making “90 feel like 50 by 2030”, including programmes focused on rejuvenating bone marrow and blood cells. Meanwhile, the fintech mogul Bryan Johnson is probably best known for his anti-ageing protocol Project Blueprint (also known, bluntly, as “Don’t Die”), which, along with supplements and full body tracking, includes plasma infusions from his son.
A recent fictional bestseller – Notes on Infinity by Austin Taylor – extrapolates from real-world research on senescence happening at the author’s alma mater. David Sinclair’s Harvard lab is controversially at work on so-called Yamanaka factors, a set of genes that researchers hope might be used to “reprogramme” ageing cells back to a more youthful, embryonic-like state.
Anti-ageing was once a woman’s pastime, but these innovations suggest a wider preoccupation with the process. “Bro science”, for example, is a grassroots movement that emerged online in the pandemic. Proponents treat ageing like an open-source design challenge – the term most often used is “biohacking” – with testosterone injections, gym rituals and a dizzying variety of supplements: creatine, protein, collagen, NAD+, metformin. The focus here is less on looking younger than your years so much as a refusal to submit to anything as weak as cellular death.
On the surface, these worlds couldn’t look more different: Dame Helen marking her 80th in Elie Saab versus some guy named Travis shilling NMN supplements on TikTok. But whether it’s “age gracefully” or “don’t die,” both frame time as a threat to be managed through purchasing power.
Karl Marx famously wrote about capital as a kind of “living death” – a vampire draining the life-force from workers and natural resources. A bloodsucking Johnson was probably not what the German economist had in mind, but the resonance is hard to ignore. Graceful ageing and biohacking both offer to smooth the rough edges of mortality – but only for those who can pay. Youth might soon be wasted on the super-rich.
Janet, I think, didn’t have a peptide or a protocol. She had a good haircut, maybe a lipstick she liked, and people who turned out to remember her face. That isn’t nothing. It might even be grace.
