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Gulf Today
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Gulf Today
Katie Piper's right, ageing as a woman is like a bereavement
Helen Coffey, The Independent '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.
The Independent
13-05-2025
- Health
- The Independent
A ‘Longevity Doctor' tells me how old I REALLY am
The Independent 's Features Writer Helen Coffey visits a so-called ' longevity doctor' to find out how old her body really is – and whether it's possible to slow down, or even reverse, the aging process. Longevity medicine, once associated with billionaire biohackers like Bryan Johnson, is gaining traction as a more mainstream approach to personalised healthcare. From blood tests to bone scans and a fitness stress test, Coffey undergoes a full-body MOT to reveal her 'biological age' – and explores whether anti-ageing science is really just hype, or the future of wellbeing.
Gulf Today
04-02-2025
- Gulf Today
The rise of the middle-class shoplifter
Helen Coffey, The Independent You wouldn't steal a car,' the Noughties video piracy PSA infamously pointed out. 'You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television.' Twenty years on, it feels like many of us would steal just about anything else though. Call me crazy, but I've always subscribed to the notion that nicking stuff is, well, wrong, and that the law is something that should largely be abided by in a civilised society. But these days, I increasingly feel like an outlier — a hopelessly naive hick amid a sea of otherwise upstanding citizens who believe they're inherently entitled to a 'five-finger discount' whenever they like. All the evidence seems to suggest that we've entered the era of the middle-class shoplifter. I present to you exhibit A: an anonymous first-person piece recently featured in The Times, in which the writer confessed to stealing 'a magazine here, a Mother's Day card there, anything I felt I shouldn't have to pay for.' The author in question, a Gen Z graduate in the first round of post-uni job hunting, justified this recently acquired criminal habit by framing it as the natural response to an overstretched budget. Yet in the same breath, they admitted: 'It's not as if I was Aladdin, stealing what I couldn't afford. But I was stealing what I didn't want to pay for.' Therein lies the distinction: 'want', not 'need'. 'Would not', rather than 'could not'. Their first intentional theft was telling: a pain au chocolat. We're hardly talking Les Mis's Jean Valjean here, forced into snatching a hunk of bread to fend off starvation. No, what we're looking at is a person who quite fancies a bougie pick-me-up pastry with their morning coffee, and believes that they deserve to have it for free. 'Everything we desire is dangled like a carrot in front of us daily on social media — and we are not willing to wait for it. We are, after all, the impatient generation,' the writer concluded. Now, before you think I'm here to use this as a stick with which to beat the already much-maligned Gen Z, I promise I'm not — far from it. The truth is, most people I know are middle-class millennials with, at this stage, fairly good jobs, mid-tier salaries and comfortable lifestyles to match. And yet a considerable majority of these people would, and do, quite happily steal things they can easily afford on a regular basis. They barely seem to think of it as shoplifting. We're never talking big-ticket, expensive items; just like that anonymous Gen-Zer, these part-time kleptos are merely 'forgetting' to scan an item or two on their Waitrose shop. Maybe that almond croissant goes straight in the bag for life without being 'beeped' through first. Perhaps an avocado 'accidentally' gets put through as a carrot. There's always plausible deniability baked in — 'Whoopsy! Silly old me!' — and always the reliance on their obvious middle-class credentials to protect them from criminal conviction should they get busted by staff. 'It was a simple mistake, your honour, of course I didn't mean to pass off that sourdough as a plain white loaf!' I'm no longer all that surprised by the revelation that most of my generally law-abiding friends and acquaintances have developed a very specific blind spot that means they find this behaviour perfectly acceptable. It's become normalised to the point where I feel like I'm the one who should be justifying my decision to pay for all items in the bagging area. There's even a term for this recent phenomenon of well-to-do thieves outwitting the self-scan system: Swipers, coined by City University criminology professor Emmeline Taylor as an acronym for 'seemingly well-intentioned patrons engaging in regular shoplifting'. These people 'would not steal using any other technique, they're not interested in putting chocolate down their pants or a piece of steak in their coat', she previously told The Times. Their numbers have grown substantially since the introduction of self-service checkouts. Yet the trend for purloining isn't confined to groceries. Far from being the preserve of students, the act of swiping a glass from a club or restaurant is just as prevalent among my mates in their thirties. Only now, there's not even the excuse of being skint and wanting to drink cheap box wine out of something other than a Sports Direct mug at a house party — the reasoning is simply that they like the design and think it would make a quirky addition to an already extensive glassware collection. They spend enough on drinks, goes the (to my mind) flimsy justification; in a way, they've already paid for that cut-glass tumbler. An image of Bilbo Baggins in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring springs to mind, the much-memeified line where the hobbit stubbornly looks down at the One Ring and defiantly mutters, 'After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it?' (Because it's not yours!, I want to shriek hysterically in response.) The same goes for fancy napkins, crockery, silverware — I've even seen a salt and pepper shaker disappear into the designer bag of a professional who I know for a fact earns at least twice my salary. A 2023 survey from catering equipment supplier Nisbets found that a staggering 37 million Brits have stolen glasses from restaurants, 17 million have stolen tableware, and 4 million steal from eateries on a weekly basis. Then there's public transport. In recent years, I've come to realise just how many of my peers see train fares as 'optional', a nice-to-have extra if you can be bothered or think you might get caught. The rationalisation is frequently that 'train fares are too expensive', without any acknowledgement that perhaps the number of people who refuse to pay for an essential service drives up the price for everyone else. More than three-quarters (79 per cent) of Londoners who travel by Tube or national rail at least one day a week have seen people evading fares in the last year, according to a 2024 YouGov poll, including 49 per cent who see it 'very or fairly frequently'. Fare dodgers reportedly cost Transport for London (TfL) £130m a year and, whether true or not, the majority of the public (54 per cent) believe that fare dodgers can afford to pay for travel – and that they simply choose not to. Between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, Northern Rail had to investigate 57,302 reports of attempted fare evasion, issue 41,922 Penalty Fare Notices and attend 172 court sittings. As Mark Powles, commercial and customer director at Northern, said at the time: 'The reality is that fare dodgers expect the taxpayer to pick up the tab for their journey — and that's just not on.' Nobody likes having to cough up for things. Most of us would, of course, love to have everything we wanted for free. But whenever people explain away their pilfering by banging on about 'victimless crimes', the question I always come back to is this: what would happen if everybody decided that they were somehow exempt from the social contract? What would happen if everyone believed that they were inexplicably entitled to go through life using goods and services without ever paying for them? 'Total anarchy', seems to be the most obvious answer. So if playing by the rules makes me woefully uncool in the modern era, then hey, just call me a loser. French patisserie tastes all the sweeter without a guilty conscience anyway.
