Katie Piper’s right, ageing as a woman is like a bereavement

“Age is just a number,” goes the old adage. The new version should perhaps come with an addendum: “Age is just a number — but one that your face and body should never reflect.” It was the recent words of presenter and activist Katie Piper that prompted this musing on our collective endeavour to erase the visible passage of time.

“Ageing can be compared to a bereavement,” the Loose Womenpanellist said at this year’s Hay Festival while promoting her new book, Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space.

“Sometimes we know we’re losing somebody or something, and it’s slow, it’s gradual — and when it’s ageing, we look down at our hands, we see they look different. We catch ourselves in the shop window, and everything’s changed.”

The 41-year-old’s sentiments hit a nerve. I’m 38, a mere slip of a girl, surely, and yet I’ve already started having those out-of-body experiences — suddenly seeing a photo of myself taken from an unexpected angle and thinking, “Who’s she? That middle-aged woman with the chins and the deeply etched eye bags?”

Or catching a glimpse in the mirror, brought up short by the marching silver threads that can never be beaten back no matter how often I dye my hair, because there’s always more, more, more — a never-ending onslaught of grey to remind me that I’m getting older by the day. Piper, who has had to endure multiple surgeries to repair her face and eyesight ever since she was the victim of an acid attack orchestrated by an ex-boyfriend in 2008, has a very different relationship with her appearance compared to most of us. “Women age out of the male gaze,” she said frankly. “I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn’t just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things.”

The reality is, everywhere you look, women are point-blank refusing to engage with the “bereavement” of ageing; instead, they’re locked into a relentless quest to freeze time and, increasingly, reverse it. This endeavour is nothing new. Though the modern iteration of “anti-ageing products” can have been said to start in the first half of the 20th century, with the likes of Elizabeth Arden and Holly Rubinstein creating a mass market for their “rejuvenation” treatments, go back a few centuries and you’ll find Elizabethan women putting raw meat on their faces to turn back the clock. Travel further, to the first century BC, and Cleopatra was famously taking daily donkey milk baths for the same purpose. Hankering after youth and beauty is clearly hardwired into the human experience, the physical manifestation of our innate fear of death.

But what has changed is the advancement of the technology to facilitate this age-old pursuit, and the extreme makeovers that are now being positioned by female celebrities as the gold standard towards which we should all be secretly striving. Or should that be “make-unders” — as in, make this 60-year-old look underage, please? The most recent example to send shockwaves around the aesthetics world is Kris Jenner and her time-defying facelift. The woman is 69, but you’d never know that from her brand new £100,000 face. Rumoured to be her fifth surgery, and also rumoured to be a “deep plane facelift” – because God forbid one of these women ever actually admit to what they’re having done – the op has left her plump-cheeked, smooth-skinned and, ultimately, looking like an uncanny valley version of her daughter, Kim Kardashian. It’s utterly mesmerising, the intricate artistry of someone who’s arguably more wizard than plastic surgeon.

Though Jenner is on one end of the spectrum – and perhaps feels like such measures are a prerequisite for being the matriarch of the nip-and-tuck-happy Kardashian dynasty – you don’t have to look very far to see examples of Benjamin Buttons everywhere. Demi Moore, who has denied having various cosmetic procedures in the past, has fewer wrinkles at 62 than she did 20 years ago. Nicole Kidman has a face so taut it doesn’t seem humanly possible that it’s seen 57 trips around the sun.