Below is an extract from Katrina Lawrence's new book Paris Dreaming: What The City of Light Taught Me About Life, Love & Lipstick that the author kindly shared with BEAUTYDIRECTORY.
Diane de Poitiers & the French Cult of the Femme d’un Certain Âge
One of the most celebrated beauties in French history, Diane de Poitiers was, stylistically, light years ahead of her era. When other women were wearing splashy gem-encrusted gowns in bright jewel hues, Diane stuck to black and white, which beautifully set off her luminous complexion. Unlike her contemporaries, she didn’t paint or powder her face. Her secret to flawless skin and rosy cheeks was a zealous wellbeing routine that involved plunging herself in cold baths every morning, drinking gallons of broth, taking regular exercise, and having early nights. Her discipline paid off; she was acknowledged as the most beautiful woman in the realm — if not the life of the party. But Diane had reason to work hard at her beauty routine: she was twenty years older than the king. She might have appeared the poster girl for ageing gracefully, but the abounding rumours about magic potions were partly true. In 2009, forensic experts examining her newly discovered bones found excessively high levels of gold and mercury, evidence that Diane regularly ingested a liquid gold brew of some kind, doubtless in the belief that it would ignite a glow from within.
Parisian women, I’ve come to learn, no longer resort to drastic measures in the pursuit of physical beauty, but some of their other anti- ageing tricks are remarkably Diane-esque: they regularly visit spas for the rejuvenating properties of fresh mineral-rich water; they walk as much as possible; they consume soup like it’s going out of fashion … Generally, they look after themselves, and don’t overdo things. There’s a commonly held French view that feeling great is the most effective way to look your best, all through life. This doesn’t, however, mean they don’t zealously fight the hands of time. Any visit to a pharmacie — jam-packed with bottles of vitamin-powered potions and beautiful Parisiennes alike — will attest to this. But a good skincare ritual, according to French women, is as much about a pampering excuse as the antioxidant powers. Beauty is not pain in France. Commitment and self-control, sure. But pain, non.
From my numerous interviews with Paris-based beauty experts, I’ve also gauged that French women aren’t as scared of ageing as Australian women seem to be. La beauté n’a pas d’ âge (Beauty doesn’t have an age) is a common French expression, and there’s something so glamorous about the idea of une femme d’un certain âge, also a familiar phrase, and one that just doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi in English.
‘Have you noticed how many women here don’t look as though they’ve had work done?’ I commented to Mum, as we approached the 7th arrondissement, an area in which you might expect to see skin as smooth and timeless as Hermès silk.
‘I definitely don’t feel as old as I sometimes do in Sydney,’ remarked Mum, ‘where you can feel out of date for not doing botox.’ Now, my mother is no slouch in the complexion department — her facialist is programmed into her phone on speed-dial, and her beauty cabinet puts even mine to shame. But Mum has, with every year and new wrinkle, adhered fast to her no-knives-no-needles policy, no matter how much such invasive procedures come to be commonly considered just another component of skincare.
‘I much prefer the au naturel way in which French women age,’ added Mum. But this, I’ve come to discover, is not quite true. France loves to have the rest of the world think its women don’t succumb to plastic surgery, that the facial exercising that comes with French vowel pronunciation is firming enough, and that everything else can be fixed with a good haircut. Truth is, while facelifts might be falling from favour, as they are in many countries, zaps and jabs (both fillers and freezers) are reported to be as common there as anywhere else. After all, it was a French man who invented the term plastic surgery, in 1798 (inspired by the Greek word for moulding: plastikos). A little over a century later, a French woman, plastic surgeon Suzanne Noël, would become the pioneer of the ‘mini-lift’, a less-is-more approach that has become the bedrock of anti-ageing philosophy in France.
‘I feel like, in Sydney, there’s this pressure to be ageless — it’s hard to tell if some women are thirty or fifty,’ I said. ‘Here, it’s more about looking good for your age than not your age at all. Coco Chanel once said something like, nature gives you the face you have at twenty, life shapes the face you have at thirty, but at fifty you have the face you deserve. But that’s not necessarily the case anymore, because there are so many tricks for cheating nature.’
I was, at that point, at a beauty crossroads. I’d gone as far as creams and serums alone would take me — and I could continue on that road to natural ageing, but it was fast going downhill, with potholes and bumps to boot. Or, I could take a sharp right and hit the superhighway of anti- ageing — with its smooth, new surface, yet regular, and exorbitantly priced, toll stations. I’d ignored the turn-offs to it for years, but as life became busier, its various stresses mapping themselves out on my face, I was increasingly favouring the short-cut high-tech approach to looking my best.
‘But beauty has never been an even playing field,’ shrugged Mum. ‘Just like life, really. And as with life, you have to pick your battles. You can’t have it all, at least not at the same time, and you’ll never be happy until you accept this. So beauty, for me, is a case of, which battles do I really need to fight? And right now, I don’t have time or energy to add anything extra to my beauty routine, without it taking away from my other routines, like seeing friends or reading or working.’
Only my mother could look at beauty as an issue of opportunity cost. But then again, beauty is very much about economics, something of which Suzanne Noël was well aware. The surgeon was also a fierce suffragist, which isn’t so remarkable in itself (after all, only in paradoxical Paris can femininity and feminism not be mutually exclusive), nor should it shock that she didn’t challenge what could be perceived as a patriarchal definition of beauty in the first place (there were too many other fights for women to take on at the time, such as the right to vote). What’s really fascinating is that Noël’s motivating factor was her resolute belief that women would better compete in the workplace if they looked younger and fresher. In this, her pragmatism was radically innovative; over a century later, studies prove that the beautiful are more highly paid and regularly promoted. Life was full of battles for Noël, too, and beauty, for her, was a potent weapon — so why not use it?
French women, of course, also know that they’re supporting a major local industry every time they swipe on a Lancôme lipstick or massage in a Guerlain cream. Beauty, which has many definitions in Paris, is, above all, big business. And let’s not forget that the French economy is boosted by the worldwide myth that Parisiennes, of all ages, are the most elegant earthlings of all, beauty lore that can be traced back to the days of Diane de Poitiers. Four hundred years on from the original femme d’un certain âge, another woman famous for wearing black and white, Coco Chanel, would further embellish the myth of eternally beautiful Parisiennes. ‘You can be gorgeous at thirty, charming at forty,’ she proclaimed, ‘and irresistible for the rest of your life.’
Click here to find out more about what inspired Lawrence to write her book.