Tracee Ellis Ross, Kate Winslet, Andie MacDowell, and Pamela Anderson have all said, on the record, that they like getting older, and the research on aging and wellbeing suggests they have the better end of the argument, even as the beauty industry keeps selling its reversal.
Youth, the line usually credited to George Bernard Shaw goes, is wasted on the young. Tracee Ellis Ross, fifty-three and sounding surer of it than most people are of anything, would file a dissent. “I, personally, have always loved getting older, like, genuinely,” she told NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. “I think it’s an honor to get older.” She does not offer this as the brave face of a woman managing a loss, the way the culture tends to hear such things; she means the getting older is the gift, the ease and the clarity of it earned rather than mourned. “Not everybody gets to get older,” she said, “and I’m not sure why we don’t look at it that way.”
She is not alone in saying so, and the women saying it are, pointedly, women who have spent their lives being looked at. Kate Winslet, who turned fifty last year, has described the plain relief of no longer minding. “Life is too short. I don’t want to look back and go ‘why did I worry about that thing’ and so guess what — I don’t worry anymore,” she told the BBC. Cast as the photographer Lee Miller, she declined to be sculpted into someone thinner and defended a body that looked like a life lived. “She wasn’t lifting weights or doing Pilates. She was eating cheese, bread and drinking wine, and not making a big deal of it. So of course, her body would be soft,” Winslet said.
Why women over fifty are embracing aging
The refusal is often about beauty as much as ease, about declining the premise that the two part ways at some birthday. Andie MacDowell let her hair go gray during the pandemic and has been unrepentant about how it looks. “I think women are tired of the idea that you can’t get old and be beautiful,” she told The Zoe Report, and the double standard behind it is one she would rather simply ignore. “Men get old and we keep loving them. And I want to be like a man,” she said.
Pamela Anderson, who built a career on a particular kind of looking and then walked into Paris Fashion Week with a bare face, calls the shift a lark rather than a sacrifice, “freeing, and fun, and a little rebellious too,” she told Elle. She is, by her own account, amused by the whole business of it. “I think we all start looking a little funny when we get older … I’m kind of laughing at myself when I look at the mirror. I go, ‘Wow, this is really … what’s happening to me?'” she said.
The mixed messages women get about aging
The same culture that calls aging a privilege spends heavily to sell its reversal, and in 2024 Americans underwent more than 28 million minimally invasive cosmetic procedures, 93 percent of them on women, including 9.88 million neuromodulator injections, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported. The message a woman near sixty receives is therefore doubled and self-canceling, age gracefully and also correct the evidence that you are.
Tracey Gendron, who chairs the Department of Gerontology at Virginia Commonwealth University, argues that the flattery and the fear are the same product. “We finally start to see the shame-based, fear-based messages and marketing that teaches us to be afraid of aging,” she told the University of Washington School of Nursing, a fear so ambient it is hard to recognize as fear. The women declining it are not pretending the messages have stopped; they are turning the volume down.
What research says about growing older
There is a body of research suggesting they have the better end of the argument. Laura Carstensen, the psychologist who directs the Stanford Center on Longevity, has spent decades documenting a counterintuitive pattern, that emotional life tends to improve rather than fray with age, as the years grow more finite and more precious. “When time horizons are relatively short, people focus on emotionally meaningful goals,” she told Forbes, which is a scientist’s way of naming the same clarity Ross calls an honor and Winslet calls not worrying.
Older people, in Carstensen’s studies, report steadier moods and closer attention to what matters; the wisdom is not a consolation handed over in exchange for the wrinkles but the thing that arrives alongside them. Her larger argument is that decline is not the whole story of a life span. “We are increasingly recognizing the malleability of aging,” she said, “some of what we believe to be inevitable, isn’t inevitable.”
So the old line has it backward, or at least only half right. Youth is not wasted on the young; it is simply the part that comes first, and it is not the part these women say they want back. “I am so much more comfortable in my skin,” Ross said of where she is now, and she was not being wistful about where she had been. “I would not go back if you paid me.”
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