thoughts on Julia Roberts’ 58-year-old-mouth— and why the conversation on women, ageing and aesthetics desperately needs a facelift

call the surgeon STAT!

While waiting for a delayed train at Holborn station last week, I spent exactly twelve minutes contemplating Julia Robert’s mouth. Across the platform from where I sat, her face was prominently featured on one of those billboard-sized posters workmen plaster convexly onto the tube tunnel walls in the months leading up to awards season. It was impossible to miss.

She was wincing slightly, like a woman running late for a dinner who has just realised her last clean pair of black tights has a massive run down the calf. The famous pillow lips, un-plumped by filler, were crinkled thin and turned down at the corners. The deep set dark eyes gazed into the middle distance, not as if she was looking at anything in particular but instead preoccupied by private unmentionable thoughts.

Roberts’ face was (and is) unmistakably her own but it was different from the one that made her famous. That face was configured around a very different mouth, impossibly voluminous in a time before lip filler. The irrepressible trampoline smile that bounced a thousand mediocre nineties rom-coms to box office glory had somehow evolved into the grimace of a seasoned middle-aged actress vying for a second Oscar before the final alterations set in — but also knowing deep down it’s a lost cause.

I’m not saying Roberts doesn’t look good. She looks incredible! Having said that, I don’t believe for a second she hasn’t had ‘work done.’

The point is, if she has had, it’s spectacularly subtle and expensive. ‘Good work,’ as it’s called in show business. Glorious faces like Julia Roberts’, in my view, ought to be treated like priceless cultural artefacts. They are contemporary culture’s sublime antiquities, great works of public art and should be restored like the Mona Lisa or the David using the cosmetic equivalent of warm water and soft toothbrushes, over months and years, by patient and highly trained professionals. We’ve all seen the tragic results that occur when celebrated beauties allow themselves to snipped, hoiked, tucked and injected without care. It find it depressing that we will never see what Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan and now even (god help us) Emma Stone, actually might look like late middle age were it not for an army of meddling aestheticians in lab coats peddling the latest bogus beauty trend.

Roberts, on the other hand, has succeeded in projecting a visage that reflects exactly what she is: A rich and globally famous actress with the skin of Aphrodite and the bone structure of the Parthenon aging gracefully in a way that makes her look older than the beforetimes — but a solid decade and a half younger than she actually is.

How Roberts actually got her face to this pleasing state of balance is entirely her own business. I’m just grateful she’s given us the gift of allowing us to see her as older version of what is recognisably her actual self, instead of some unsatisfying sandblasted Julia Roberts-adjacent avatar.

Speaking of cosmetic enhancement, is anyone else sick to death of the current ‘media conversation’ around women, aging and aesthetics? Because I certainly am. Frustrated, irritated and bored to ugly snot-sobbing.

As far I can tell there are exactly three Officially Acceptable Positions one can take on the issue, and all of them reductive and fixed. Sorry if this describes (or worse, offends) you but they are are as follows:

1) Cosmetic enhancements are an anti-feminist evil and anyone who resorts to them is a traitor to the sisterhood!

2) Cosmetic enhancements are a gift from the gods and we should all try to look as young as we possibly can within the budget we have and feel zero shame about it!

3) Cosmetic enhancements are a grubby thing to talk about in mixed company and should therefore only be undertaken with discretion. However, if pressed on the subject while in like-minded female (or gay male) company, it is permissible to make an oblique admission such as, “Well I didn’t invent the patriarchy did I?”

Like any sensible middle aged woman, I have a foot set firmly in all three camps. And now comes the point in the piece where I tell you exactly what I have and haven’t done to my own body and face in the hope of clinging to youth. (Deep cleansing breath) okay here goes: