I Saw Wrinkles Last Week and Loved It

Two weeks ago, I went to Corfu, Greece for a reading week break. The crystal clear water, the lush green hills tumbling into dramatic, jagged, coastlines, the abundance of fresh feta at every table: it was all even more beautiful than I had hoped. But none of it was what struck me most.

It was the wrinkles.

On my first day at the beach I was struck by the unspoken ease in the bodies around me. Women with sun-kissed faces and belly rolls, carefreely pulling on a swimsuit, easing into the water, snacking on phyllo wrapped pastries. Bodies that had very obviously lived, not bodies that had been tightened, smoothed, or frozen in time. No one seemed consumed with how they looked while existing.

Coming from California, where even a casual beach day can feel like a performance, the contrast caught my attention. At home, the beach is a backdrop. It is a setting for Hinge profile photos and perfecting tan lines. Here, it was just a place to exist. To live.

There is something radical about that, especially in our day and age. There is something quietly revolutionary about a place where the beaches are not a stage to present your most perfect self, most sculpted silhouette or bounciest blowout. Where bodies untouched by Botox or Ozempic are simply and unremarkably normal. Where aging is not something being fought in every mirror and doctor’s office, but just something that happens. I found it deeply freeing.

This isn’t about shaming anyone who enjoys taking Instagram photos at the beach or wants to smooth the lines on their forehead. The issue lies in the question of why we feel compelled to do these things in the first place. In my opinion, it’s a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation: rather than criticizing women for wanting Botox, we should examine the culture that tells us our worth is tied to our appearance and that we must preserve it at all costs. When women are repeatedly made to feel that aging diminishes their value, it’s not surprising that many look for ways to push back against it.

I can’t help but think about Susan Sontag’s book On Women, specifically the essay ‘The Double Standard of Aging.’ Sontag argues that aging is “an instrument of oppression that enhances a man but progressively destroys a woman.” For men, aging is “allowed” and even encouraged–their lines and grey hair read as experience and character. On the contrary, because a woman’s value is tied to her physical appearance, the same changes represent failure and loss. Sontag makes the point that the system works because women participate in it. Each time a woman lies about her age or reaches for anti-aging products, she “becomes an accomplice in her own underdevelopment as a human being.”

While this is certainly blunt, I do think there is truth behind it. The idea that women are trained from a young age to understand their value as inseparable from their appearance and that the thought of said appearance changing (naturally, I might add) inevitably leads to a type of performance and denial.

In Corfu, the performance had simply stopped. Either no one had got the memo, or no one had ever even needed it. The women on the beach were not sucking anything in, or angling themselves away from an imaginary camera. They were swimming, laying, laughing, and existing in their bodies the same way you exist in a home you have lived in forever. 

This is what Sontag was calling for. Not the erasure of beauty, but the refusal to abide by the relentless standard that turns a woman’s appearance into a project to be maintained rather than a life to be lived. Wrinkles on faces creased with laughter, are not signs of loss, they are representations of a confidence rooted in appreciating the things your body still allows you to do: laugh, smile, swim, lay. Rolls, freckles, and wrinkles are physical evidence of your existence and the fact that you are still here, living the life you’ve made for yourself. 

• #aging
• #beauty
• #confidence
• #life
• #style