[Dusty]

After reading this, you will better appreciate being a man.

Four women recount when they discovered they hit the wall.

The awful day we knew we'd lost our looks: It's the moment all women dread. Four writers reveal when it hit them

By JILLY JOHNSON and KATE GARRAWAY and CLAUDIA CONNELL and HELENA POWELL


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/articl...z2vEm2XqsU


Former model Jilly Johnson, 60, lives in Hertfordshire with her husband Ashley. She says:
Jilly Johnson: I was 42

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I’ll never forget it. I was crossing the road to enter Selfridges department store in London when I caught a glimpse of a tubby woman reflected in the shop’s huge windows. When her strides started to mirror mine, it hit me: she was me.

I was completely taken aback, and as people rushed past me, I stood stock-still in the middle of the road staring at my reflection. I didn’t look willowy and light, as I’d always been. On that day, aged 42, I looked dumpy and middle-aged.

Journalist and author Helena Frith Powell, 48, lives in France and Abu Dhabi. She says: I was 38

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It was ten years ago, almost to the day. I was 38 and driving into our local village in France when I caught sight of myself in my rear view mirror. There was a criss-cross of wrinkles across my forehead and around my eyes.

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Just the other day, a friend and I were discussing a man she knows who, at the age of 44, has just married a 22-year-old.

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Rather depressingly it dawned on me that, given the choice, men of my generation probably don’t want anything to do with women my age.

GMTV presenter Kate Garraway, 46, lives in London with her husband and two children. She says:

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Then I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror and thought: ‘It’s happened.’

In that moment, I realised that however much I try to halt the ageing process with creams and potions, diet and exercise regimes, it will defy me and happen anyway. It’s happening now. And there’s nothing I can do about it.


But being happily married and having children has taken away a lot of the insecurities women have when they’re young, when we endlessly analyse our looks, worrying about every split end in our hair, because we want the people we fancy to fancy us back.

If it means being settled and content, getting older can be a relief.

Writer Claudia Connell is 47 and lives in London. She says:

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I was 34 and it was shortly after that I began to notice other signs of ageing: the fine lines around my eyes, the vertical lines on my décolletage and how I could no longer keep pace with the younger women at my aerobics classes.

Throughout my teens and 20s, I had always looked years younger than I was. But, as I hit my mid-30s, all that stopped. Mother Nature took the brakes off and, seemingly overnight, I turned from bright-eyed, dewy-skinned nymph into red-eyed, flaky-skinned hag.

It was also in my mid 30s that I realised I could no longer go braless. I used to like not wearing one under strapless tops, but things were starting to sag and my once-perky boobs looked like a couple of balloons — a week after the party.

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Now 47, I am reminded of my advancing years from the moment I wake up, when my knees creak as I get out of bed, when I squint to see the number on a bus and when I never leave home without a packet of Rennies, cardigan and hand cream. Some people may come to terms with ageing — I never will.