After I said goodbye to Kuipers, I sat in my office, surrounded by the books and art that I love. Some of them are books my father bought me. He was known to prowl the late-night bookstores of Toronto, scouring remainder tables for discounted titles he thought his children might like.

  I may not be an investor. I may never be an investor. I may never achieve a level of financial literacy that would make Tori Dunlap happy. I may always have too many shoes in my closet. But I’ve also met Shelley Kuipers’s criteria for being a financial feminist, I think: I donate money to feminist causes; I support other women. I’ve chosen to make myself comfortable enough that I can help others, by writing about these issues. I’ve kept myself afloat, and I’m pulling others onto the raft, too. It’s ridiculous to think that I can do it alone, or that any of us can. We’re going to need a bigger boat.

  6.

  When’s Your Sell-by Date?

  THERE WERE FOUR SUPERMODELS ON THE COVER OF Vogue’s September 2023 issue, all of them in their fifties, their faces as smooth as skinned peaches. As smooth as eggs. As smooth as when they first became famous, decades before. I could have put on a pair of skates and glided across their eerily smooth foreheads.

  My finger traced their preternaturally youthful faces (preternatural, from the Latin praeter naturam, or “beyond nature”). Nature, or nature’s counterpart science, had been kind to Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, and Linda Evangelista. But when the issue of Vogue dropped, the criticism followed: What sorcery was this? Did the editors use a camera filter designed by NASA? Why couldn’t women in their fifties look like they were in their fifties? A story appeared in the New York Times under the headline “Do supermodels age, or just get airbrushed?”

  Perhaps I was merely jealous. My own forehead was starting to resemble a drought-stricken farmer’s field. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and thought: How did Tommy Lee Jones get into my bathroom? Generally I like how I look, but those forehead wrinkles were the work of some dark-hearted imps.

  Here is a secret for you, one that I don’t like to admit, though it is not exactly shameful. When I lived in Berlin in 2019, I had my forehead injected with Botox, in a clinic across from the Bundesnachrichtendienst, the German spy headquarters. I tried to puzzle out the word in my head, which is perhaps why the dermatologist looked at me in alarm and said, “Sechsundzwanzig.” Twenty-six. She was telling me that I needed twenty-six jabs of toxin in my forehead to make me look young again. Three hundred euros later, I did not look younger. I was still a middle-aged woman whose forehead furrowed when confronted with mystifying German words.

  Is there a German word for feeling liberated and stifled at the same time? That, to me, is the quintessence of middle age as a woman. There definitely is a German word for hypocrisy—Heuchelei (don’t try to pronounce it)—and that’s the other way to describe this place in which we find ourselves. My own hypocrisy, as a woman who wants to embrace ageing but is still chained to personal vanity and a punishing economic system that values youth. And the hypocrisy of this society, which says we’ve reached a golden age for golden girls, while also selling us every remedy to try to turn back the clock.

  I don’t begrudge those supermodels whatever interventions are required for their internal peace and professional viability. What I do find maddening—and what I hope to explore in this chapter—is the gulf between platitudes about ageing and the reality of being a woman in a society that is both sexist and ageist. Yes, you’re supposed to embrace your no-fucks-left-to-give years, to wear purple and stride boldly, but only if you’re lucky enough to be solvent, healthy, and employable. Only if you spend your precious remaining time hiding the physical signs of age. What the world says about older women and how it actually treats them are two very different things.

  Those supermodels on the Vogue cover sure seemed happy to be getting older. “The world puts a lot of pressure obviously on women as they age,” Cindy Crawford said. “We can still have fun. We can still be beautiful. We can still be visible.” Naomi Campbell wanted readers to know that “age is a number and it doesn’t mean anything.” At least Linda Evangelista admitted to being a hypocrite because she got Botox (hello, sister!). But she also extolled the joys of getting older: “I don’t mind and I never did mind aging. Aging gets us to where we want to be, and that’s for me a long life.”

  But if they’re all so happy to get older, why aren’t they willing to look it? Wait. It’s okay. I think I already know the answer to that one.

  * * *

  —

  None of the supermodels on the cover of Vogue had grey hair. I mean, they probably had grey hair underneath their expensive highlights, but they’d done their utmost to repel that sign of ageing—King Canute against the genetic tides.

  My genetic tides would have me white as an Arctic fox, if I stopped colouring my hair. My grandmother Alma’s hair was snow white at twenty-nine. But those were different times: Alma could gut a deer and read tea leaves, but she did not have to sell her skills on an open marketplace that values the new and the fresh over the seasoned and grey.

  Letting your hair go grey, like having cosmetic surgery, is both an action and a symbol. These are personal decisions, but multiplied millions of times they become societal issues. In the summer of 2022, when the beloved CTV News anchor Lisa LaFlamme was terminated from her position at the age of fifty-eight, not long after letting her hair naturally silver, the great grey hair debate seized Canadians’ attention, and ignited a national conversation about discrimination and ageing.

  But let me back up a moment: I also left my long-time job as a newspaper columnist in the summer of 2022, for reasons that I’ll discuss later in this chapter. The pandemic had ground me down, and I needed a change. A few weeks after I left my job, I stared in the mirror. Who was I now? One thing was certain. I was a person who dyed her hair. I’d been doing it since I was fifteen. At different stages of my life I’d dyed my hair fire-engine red and the burnt orange favoured by the Italian nonnas of my childhood.

  One thing I’d never been was grey, and I was not about to start in my fifties, as I embarked on a career as a freelance writer. Various trend stories told me that the pandemic had made it cool to grow your roots out, and I did have friends who’d gone grey to glorious effect. But mainly I saw, and heard, the opposite: to retain an edge in a competitive industry, I needed to look like there was ample gas in my tank, which meant no grey hairs on my head.

  I weighed the not-insubstantial cost of continuing to have my hair coloured in the salon, with touch-ups done at home, against the potential future income that I would earn as a reasonably youngish-looking woman. Was it a feminist choice? No. Was it even based in empirical truth? Looking around at all the professional women who coloured their hair, it seemed to be. I made a business decision.

  Interestingly, “business decision” was exactly the phrase Bell Media used to justify its termination of Lisa LaFlamme, who’d been the CTV National News anchor since 2011. Shortly after the shocking announcement, the Globe and Mail ’s Robyn Doolittle reported that the senior executive in charge of news had asked at a meeting, “Who had approved the decision to ‘let Lisa’s hair go grey.’ ” Could hair colour actually be one of the reasons why a top-rated and award-winning news anchor was fired? LaFlamme remained mum, apart from a dignified video message in which she declared herself “blindsided” and “shocked and saddened” by the decision.

  “Greygate” became a huge scandal in Canada, and ignited little fires of indignation around the world. More than seventy prominent Canadians took out a two-page open letter that stated, “Even after all the progress women have made, they continue to face sexism and ageism at work every day in a way which is unacceptable. Period.” Wendy’s restaurant and Dove Canada turned their corporate icons grey. Journalists from as far away as Australia highlighted the controversy. When female anchors covered the story, they invariably did it from beneath a helmet of expensive highlights. This was the lake of hypocrisy we found ourselves wading in.

  CNN reported on the LaFlamme termination by convening a panel of three female journalists and one male host. The network’s national correspondent Erica Hill railed against the unfairness of the decision, while acknowledging that she had her hair coloured. The host, John Berman, noted that when he started showing salt-and-pepper, his producer told him to dye his hair completely grey “so that I had more gravitas.” The women around the desk gawked in disbelief.

  I did not share in this disbelief. How could you live as a woman in this world, every day committing the unpardonable sin of ageing, and not recognize the double standard that we live with—that we are complicit in—every moment? I sat there, dabbing at my own roots with plastic gloved hands, and wondered what Lisa LaFlamme had to say.

  I found out several months later, when Chatelaine magazine sent me to interview LaFlamme at her home in Midtown Toronto. It was a grey day, and her adorable chocolate Labradors followed at her heels. And yes, her silver hair gleamed in the dull winter light. I wanted to ask about so much—her celebrated journalism career, the stories she’d covered—but I also had to ask about the locks that preoccupied the country. It felt diminishing to ask questions about Nice’n Easy from someone who’d done so much important reporting on topics from war to natural disaster to political upheaval, but the conversation was on everyone’s mind.

  LaFlamme told me that other people’s fixation with her appearance had started early, as it often does for women in the public eye. At the beginning of her broadcast career, a man told her she’d “never get anywhere with that hair,” which was at the time dark, thick, and curly. She got used to comments about her appearance from viewers, though never completely. “I always thought, if I was working at a bank, would someone come up and comment on my lipstick? In the end, I didn’t care. You can’t let it get in the way of your work.”

  There was only so much LaFlamme could say about her dismissal, partly due to the terms of her agreement with Bell, but also, I sensed, because she was exhausted by the whole issue. No journalist wants to become the story. And she has never tied the hair issue to being fired, though others have.

  Still, she gamely told me about how she’d grown tired of being a drudge at the temple of hair dye. She’d had to colour more and more frequently, once at a military base while on assignment in Afghanistan. During the pandemic, as salon visits became more difficult, she told a senior news executive, a woman, that she was giving up colouring her hair and got a thumbs up. The process of having it grow out was not pleasant, but the response from viewers was overwhelmingly positive.

  And that was that. I told her about my own “business decision” to keep dyeing my roots, and we commiserated and said the things that women always say to each other in those situations: Whatever works. You do what you have to do.

  LaFlamme, like me, wanted to have a larger conversation around ambition, ageing, sexism. She’d seen female colleagues and friends of her age leaving journalism, and it suggested a pattern. But—also like me—she saw opportunity, a chance for growth. Now that she was no longer anchoring the nightly news, she could concentrate on her true passion: telling the overlooked stories of girls and women around the world. When we spoke, she was about to leave for a trip to Africa, sponsored by Journalists for Human Rights, to highlight the work of female journalists in Kenya, Congo, and Tunisia. She was savouring the rare gift of time for reflection. She leaned back on her couch, happy dogs at her feet. She said, “I’m trying to figure out how to be.”

  As I walked back to the subway, LaFlamme’s words echoed in my head: I’m trying to figure out how to be. I was, too. I was trying to figure out what this period of my life meant for me, and women like me. Were we trapped, or were we free?

  Or could it be both?

  * * *

  —

  As so many times when writing this book, I have to stop to remind myself how fortunate—entitled, privileged—I am to be able to contemplate whether to dye my hair or not. I am a white woman in a society where whiteness bestows an unfair, unacknowledged benefit, often at the expense of racialized people. My parents may not have had any money, but they encouraged me to go to university, and I’ve made my way into the middle class.

  I remind myself of this as I walk down the aisle of the drugstore, with its endless shelves of unguents and potions promising to stop the hands of time. The value of the global beauty industry varies depending on how it’s calculated, but what is indisputable is that it’s measured in the tens of billions of dollars—and it’s rapidly growing.

  Worse, if you ask me, is that the market is growing younger. “Prejuvenation” isn’t a word invented for an episode of Black Mirror; it’s a real thing. Young people, mostly women, who’ve grown up watching themselves electronically blurred thanks to social media filters, now want to see the same results in the harsh light of real life. It’s not enough to ward off the effects of ageing (rejuvenation). You have to fight the wrinkle when it’s still just a bunch of happy skin cells minding their own business. You have to prejuvenate.

  This involves all manner of hype wearing a doctor’s coat—biostimulators, microneedling, vampire facials—and an investment of both time and money. In 2022, three-quarters of U.S. cosmetic surgeons reported an increase in patients under thirty requesting procedures. I’ve seen it up close. At a family dinner, one of my beautiful young relatives pointed to her forehead and told me she’d had Botox. “But you’re gorgeous,” I said, realizing how lame it sounded even as the words left my mouth. Hadn’t I done the same thing myself? Didn’t I keep dyeing my hair? I was reminded, once again, of the gulf between where we’re supposed to be (happily ensconced on the planet I Love Myself Just The Way I Am) and where we actually are (lining up for surgery on the planet There’s Millions To Be Made From Her Anxieties So Hand Me That Needle).

  We spend billions, as a species, on making ourselves less hideous for our captors, the tiny screens in our pockets. This is not even taking into account the outlay on beauty products; one survey commissioned by Groupon in 2017 calculated the lifetime of a woman’s beauty purchases at $225,000, creating headlines like this one in the New York Post: “Vanity costs American women nearly a quarter of a million dollars.” Except what they call “vanity” I call “corporations exploiting an insecurity they created for bonanza profits.”

  This is part of the famous “pink tax” levied on women of all ages, especially those who work outside the home (which is most of us). Men also use beauty products, and indulge in cosmetic surgery, and suffer ageism. Increasingly, we see the sci-fi expeditions of tech bros in pursuit of the anti-ageing grail; they quantify their intake of micronutrients, they bench-press, they swap blood, all in the hopes of extending their lifespans. That’s madness of a different sort. To this day, though, men’s appearance is not currency the way that women’s is.

  “Beauty, women’s business in this society, is the theater of their enslavement,” Susan Sontag wrote in her 1979 essay “The Double Standard of Aging.” “Only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage that men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man.”

  Sontag’s point is that beauty—or at least our perception of it—is a social construct. A thing only contains the value bestowed by beauty because we say it does. By extension, there is nothing horrible or hideous about ageing in itself (creaking joints aside). It’s only because Western society has decided that older women are worthless—no longer fuckable (thank you, Amy Schumer)—that the message has permeated all of society. Lip service is paid to the glories of ageing, but have you looked at how much women spend to erase their lip lines? It’s enough to make you tear your hair out by its brittle, chemically depleted roots.

  On a societal level, this punishes women, especially those in the workforce. Ageism already negatively impacts workers; gendered ageism makes it worse, especially for those between jobs and seeking employment. For women in midlife, many of whom have taken time out of the workforce to raise children or look after family members, this bias can be a cruel reckoning.

  “Even if you can’t afford it, that’s the one thing you need is your bottle of dye.” That quote is from Cynthia, aged fifty-eight, from Ellie Berger’s Ageism at Work: Deconstructing Age and Gender in the Discriminating Labour Market. Cynthia is talking about what she needs to do to prepare for a job interview, and it’s just one of the revelatory interviews conducted by Berger, who’s an associate professor in sociology and anthropology at Nipissing University.

  All of the older workers in Berger’s book talk about trying to make themselves the right fit for a tough job market, but it’s the women who suffer the double burden of gendered ageism. Employers fail to interrogate their own biases when considering who might be best for the job. “New blood” is a hackneyed phrase, but also a subconscious hiring protocol.

  “Gendered ideologies, as is the case with ageist ideologies, are also very slow to change,” Berger writes. “I found that employers discriminated against older women by focusing on their older bodies. To combat this discrimination, most of the women discussed using age concealment practices, including dyeing their hair before job interviews…Overall, older women faced heightened inequalities in their job search as compared to older men.”

  There’s a reason we struggle so hard not to be invisible. The invisible don’t get fed.

  * * *

  —

  One day I was out shopping with my friend Stephanie, and I pointed to a lacy white blouse. “I’d wear that if I weren’t so old and fat.”