A 28-year-old model, staggeringly pretty and impossibly youthful by any reasonable standard, comes across as too old to be on the cover of Self magazine. The 17-year-old who gets the job admits that even she feels past her prime.
Question: If the coyly named Self is using 17-year-olds to sell its slickly packaged secret to personal well-being, what’s the cutoff age for being on the cover of Seventeen magazine? Worse, does this mean AARP should start recruiting women when they hit 29?
We know better than that. Don’t we?
The Changing Face of Beauty purports to tell us that we do indeed, but the hopeful-sounding title doesn’t always mesh with the reality of the hourlong program premiering tonight on Lifetime Television. As executive producer and host Sela Ward says in discussing that thing called beauty: “It supposedly comes in all shapes, sizes and colors. But is that really what we believe, what we’re teaching our kids?”
Ward, a model who became an actress in her mid-20s, knows the answer. Her own “moment of truth” came six years ago when she was auditioning for a James Bond movie. With all the delicacy of a karate chop from Odd Job, the producers told her they were really looking for the Sela Ward of 10 years before.
“I was only 38,” she says, “and I felt young and sexy. But in that moment I understood why a woman might feel driven to lie about her age or get a face lift. It may sound crazy, but that moment changed my life. It’s what made me want to make this film, to explore the ways in which these rigid standards of beauty impact our lives.”
Surely it will take more than a one-hour cable documentary to abolish the unrealistic standards perpetuated by American pop culture, but The Changing Face of Beauty is a start. Especially with Ward as its flag bearer.
As one who has traded on her looks for most of her career, Ward knows well that Hollywood and Madison Avenue view wrinkles and gray hair with the same enthusiasm they have for overweight people. But thanks to the happy accident of intelligent casting and gutsy programming, Ward is also striking a blow as star of the ABC series Once and Again, in which she plays — surprise! — a woman not far from her own age. (She’ll be 44 in July.) It’s one of a handful of new series –The West Wing, Family Law and Judging Amy are others — that feature female characters who have left their teens and 20s behind.
It is way too soon to label it a trend, but if all four shows survive into a second season, count on the networks coming back with more new series featuring adults old enough to remember black and white TV.
But will this lead to older faces appearing on magazine covers, and to 50- and 60-year-old actors dating women closer to their own ages in big-budget movies?
Without mentioning specifics, such as her own series, Ward suggests that the images of women are indeed starting to grow up. But her fate as a performer, she knows, isn’t entirely in her hands.
“These things are run by corporations,” she said last summer, “and it’s about the bottom line.” Then she added: “It’s all about what we, as the public, support, and what we don’t.”
The producers offer a thoughtful, wide-ranging presentation with seemingly conflicting messages. For example, there’s Phyllis Levine, an editor at Self, who says the line between real and ideal is a tightrope. “You always hear from your readers that they want things to look natural, that models are too thin, models are too made up, models are too perfect,” she says. “And the second you don’t retouch, then you get letters saying this woman is too heavy or this woman’s not pretty, or why does she have so many wrinkles? It’s quite a dilemma.”
