Looking back on it, I think our "natural" beauty code was at least as rigid as our mothers'. Our hand-sewn granny dresses from Vermont might have chafed our young nipples, but we wouldn't slip on a bra for comfort. We poured our nubile buns into bell-bottoms so tight they cut off our circulation and numbed the skin covering our hip bones. We wore ergonomically correct shoes even if they caused corns. We did all of this to look attractive to men. And we didn't comprehend our hypocrisy.

Then we got old.

As we aged, we realized we weren't all that enlightened after all. We struggled with divorce and children and careers and illness and the loss of parents and friends. And it all began to show in our faces. ("Smile," strangers would tell us on the street, "life can't be that bad.") We reluctantly acknowledged that coloring the gray and wearing bras and patting on makeup to conceal the circles beneath our eyes improved our looks.

But at some point even those stopgaps failed us. We would come home from work to a messy house, suck on a glass of pinot grigio and glimpse our aging faces in the mirror as we changed out of our work clothes. We'd furtively inch up to the mirror, pinch back the gobblerlike wattles that dangled beneath our middle-aged chins and wonder if cosmetic surgery was really such a terrible thing after all.

For several months, I myself suffered through this crisis, living in a wattle-pinching, should-I-get-a-face-lift purgatory. I knew that I looked grumpy even when I was happy, largely because of a sagging forehead and terrier-like jowls. My neck flaps didn't help, either.

I wanted a face-lift and felt guilty about it because I was, after all, a hippie chick.

My husband, who is too old to be a baby boomer and does not understand hippie chick sensibilities, bore the brunt of my angst. He listened to my jeremiads about how aging women should not cave to a youth-oriented society. Five minutes later he'd watch me pinch my wrinkles in front of the mirror. What harm, I'd ask him, would come from a natural, organic, hippie chick kind of face-lift, one that would preserve my smile lines and the crow's-feet while nuking the wattles and jowls?

"It's your decision," he would say. "I think you look just fine the way you are."

My hippie chick friends agreed with my husband. But I could tell they mostly disapproved of the surgery. Of all my hippie chick friends, not a single woman has had cosmetic surgery.

"With all of the awful things that we have to go through in life," one hippie chick girlfriend finally said, "I don't understand why you would volunteer to put yourself through another awful experience just to look younger."

She had me there. And she tweaked another nerve: I did not trust doctors. As a journalist, I'd written several investigative stories about medical malpractice cases. I couldn't forget the case of a woman who woke up from a tummy tuck with pubic hair covering her belly button.

Last December, a checkout clerk at the natural foods store asked me for my senior card. To qualify as senior in this particular establishment, one has to 60 years and older.

I was 52.

That did it. I vowed to find a good board-certified plastic surgeon and get on with it. I figured finding a doctor sensitive to hippie chicks would be a snap. If there are 9 million aging hippie chicks in America, we must have influence in the plastic surgery market, dramatically changing the aesthetic toward a more organic, natural outcome.

I figured wrong.

In the first place, although 6.5 million women of all ages had cosmetic plastic surgery in 2001, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons only a scant 112,609 women of all ages had face-lifts. About half as many had brow lifts. (Breast augmentation, eye jobs, nose jobs and liposuction were the most popular procedures.)

What's more, judging from the before and after pictures of face-lift patients on the Web site of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, it seemed to me that a lot of the women who did have face-lifts came out looking like Beverly Hills real estate agents.

Recent Stories