A free extract from my beauty book 💄

to celebrate its new jacket

Good morning! Four days to go to the US election. I am in ZIPPED BEAK mode but let’s just say I feel like everyone needs the maximal quantity of soothing things to distract them briefly, before the abyss-gazing kicks in again.

So: my beauty book, which was published last winter, has a festive new jacket for Christmas. Please note - if you have it already, don’t buy it again: new colours, same content.

And same quotes on the cover. For the short sighted squinting at their phones: Victoria Beckham says ‘I love India’s beauty advice,’ Bobbi Brown says ‘Her beauty advice is solid gold,’ and Charlotte Tilbury says ‘India Knight is a LEGEND in the beauty industry: you can trust her to get it right every single time!’.

(When Charlotte Tilbury was launching, the UK beauty writers all bumbled off one by one to her house in Notting Hill. It was the least launchy launch imaginable, incredibly relaxed and intimate - socks and crisps on the sofa sort of thing. I still smoked at the time and her child ran off giggling with my Marlboro Lights; the whole thing was like hanging out with a mate who rummaged around in her bag and said ‘try this eyeliner’. Afterwards I remember thinking, ‘she’s very good, but yet another makeup artist launching a beauty brand, hmmm, I dunno, really hope it works out for her’).

Anyway: here’s the introduction to the book, free for you to read. PS: the book is for anyone who considers themselves middle-aged. It isn’t the book for you if you’re 22 (all I have for you is: start using neck cream) - but do buy it for your mum.

I’ll do a small giveaway for paid subscribers next week, too.

Introduction

So here we are, older, having lived a whole lot of life, having learned a whole lot of valuable stuff the hard way, and still in a position to make good use of our findings. We know what’s what. We know what to care and not care about. We’re wise, or at least wiser. We’re strong as bears. We’re amazing. I love us.

But I don’t love that we’re also often newly insecure about the way ageing manifests in our faces, and about what we should do about it. Anything? Nothing? Denial? Acceptance? It’s like the trusty autopilot we relied on for decades has gone rogue: what looked great for years suddenly looks… less great. Now what?

Sometimes it feels like the choice is starkly binary. Option A is setting off on the path that ultimately leads to looking like current-era Madonna – a defiant, poignant clinging on to youth via cosmetic procedures misleadingly called ‘tweakments,’ as if they were cute, fun little nothings. Option B is going for the full pottery teacher look, in a smock and a bare face and maybe some ‘jazzy’ earrings. (No offence to pottery teachers – this, minus the jazzier aspects, is pretty much my daily look, especially when I’m at my pottery classes).

What we all want is the sane, considered middle way: the best version of us at the age we are. It sounds simple. It is not simple. We used to know what to buy, how to do our makeup, and what to put on our skin, but what was once second nature – open the makeup bag and this goes here, and this goes here, and I like putting this on like that: done, let’s go – is now more challenging. I wore flicky liquid black eyeliner most days from the age of 15 to the age of about 50, to the point where I could practically put it on in the dark, and then one day it just didn’t work anymore. It didn’t look right. I hadn’t changed, and my love of flicky liquid black eyeliner hadn’t changed. But my eyes had. The liner brush now had to travel across significantly more rugged terrain. Those new creases made it harder to apply neatly, and because –  yay – my eyelids are more hooded than they used to be, the eyeliner wasn’t properly visible when I had my eyes open.

So what, you might say. Well, so I had stopped looking like myself to my own eyes, and that is a very discombobulating thing. An eroded sense of self does not make for being comfortable in one’s skin, and is therefore deleterious to women’s happiness. It matters. I mourned the me that always wore liner. The linerless me had eyes that looked unmoored, floating about my face, undefined and naked-looking. It made me feel sad.

You’ll have your own version of my eyeliner: the lipstick that always used to look great, until it didn’t because your lips have thinned. The reliable foundation that now makes your skin look kind of dead. The eyeshadow that once glided on but now migrates to creases and sits there stubbornly. The once-reliable concealer that’s started saying “Hi! Let me just really emphasise your pores.”

When I talk to friends my age and older about beauty later in life, pretty much everyone mentions having once had a look, their look, that they could pull out of the bag no matter what, and how that look no longer quite works for them, and the feelings of sorrow and loss that engenders. What makes it worse is that they have no idea of what they should replace the lost look with. “Do I just wear beige everything now?” one friend asked. “Or grey? Because it’s not really me. The me in my head is wearing metallic eyeshadow and wispy lashes, but obviously I can’t do that either because I’d look tragic. Wouldn’t I? I literally don’t have a clue. Also, am I too old for contour? What is contour?”

The other issue that always comes up is choice. As in, there’s too much of it. You just want a mascara, but there are 3,000 on offer. It makes you exhausted just thinking about it. How are you supposed to choose, not just with mascaras but more generally? There are hundreds of thousands, millions, of beauty products on offer out there. Are they even any cop at this stage of life, or do they, like the department store Santa in Elf, sit on a throne of lies? It gets particularly confusing with skincare, when the trend is for minimalist labelling that often only tells you the chemical name of the contents, like ‘succinic acid treatment’ or ‘tranexamid acid serum’. You what?

Also in the mix: we’re no longer sure about what we’re “supposed” to look like. Our 50 or 60 or 70 isn’t our mothers’ 50 or 60 or 70, which is cheering, and that sense that older women should quietly put themselves out to pasture is eroding (quite slowly, it must be said). There’s something else at play, too. My generation and the ones before it, stretching back to the mists of time, were brought up to be found pleasing by men, to welcome or at least not mind the male gaze, to strive never to look anything other than our most desirable best. This was part and parcel of our sense of self.

We learned by societal osmosis that we had some sort of duty to be as aesthetically pleasing as was humanly possible, to primp and depilate and paint until we were “presentable”. In my first novel, written in 1999, the narrator’s mother tells her that she has “let herself go” following marriage and having children. It was kind of a joke, and also kind of not. Twenty-five years on, I work from home, mostly in no makeup, jogging bottoms and old sweaters, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to stop making jokes about how unglamorous and rustic I looked when anyone dropped in. I know that looking glamorous isn’t my job. But that stuff, hard-wired from childhood, lingers stubbornly. It’s a primal fear: do I look unsexy? Oh my God - do I look OLD?

I notice by contrast that many younger women know exactly what they think of the male gaze. They think it can go and shove itself . They don’t derive a misplaced sense of approval, let alone much of their identity, from being found pleasing by total strangers: they couldn’t care less about being deemed attractive by random men they don’t know and have no interest in knowing. Being ogled is an aggression rather than mildly flattering. And so it follows that you can tell people’s age, even if they’re coy about it, by their attitude to both beauty and, always, diet (hence the 85-year-old who won’t have cake because it’ll make her “fat”). It’s an older person’s mindset: the duty to please, even if it means you’re hungry.

I hate the idea of desperately trying to look less old to please other people. There is nothing wrong with looking older, just as there is nothing wrong with eating the cake (eat the sodding cake! embrace pleasure! time is marching on!). The book you’re holding isn’t trying to turn back time or make anyone look improbable or weird, and nor is it saying that women “should” do anything at all, although in my view we should all have a really great skincare routine. This book’s purpose is to make older women feel and look better in relation to things that might disconcert them about the way they look, and to identify the things that they – we – can actually do something about.

I am also massively against the idea that not using makeup or cosmetics is somehow a dereliction of duty. It can be a fantastic liberation, too, especially if you are of the generations I described above, so used to the relentless gaze of the patriarchy and so hardwired to be found “pleasing” by it at all times that your whole sense of self depends on it. All of that is a given. But you can still dislike your ageing neck and wonder if there’s any meaningful action you can take, and you can still occasionally fancy wearing a fantastic lipstick just for the heck of it. You know? The world is heavy. Gloom is everywhere. Beauty products are light. Everybody needs a little glam and frivolity every now and then, a little luxurious, treaty-feeling, unapologetic fun to take them away from the bleakness of the endlessly grim news cycle, or from whatever other challenges are going on in their life (the list often starts with the double whammy of ailing parents and tricky teenagers). You could even call it self-care.

Here’s how I think about it: for older women, makeup used to be the equivalent of a sweetshop, stuffed full of appetising and recognisable favourites. But now the friendly sweetshop has closed and been replaced with a gigantic megamall filled with hundreds of thousands of baffling options, all promising the moon, all leaving you giddy and exhausted with choice. So the temptation is to stick with what you know – to sit there sadly with your dusty stash – or not to bother anymore because you’re too old, there’s nothing to be done and it’s all too confusing.

That would be a mistake. New formulations and technological advances have reinvented both makeup and skincare and made both dramatically more effective. What this book seeks to do is to open up the giant sweetshop megamall especially for you, take you by the hand and lead you straight to the to the good stuff that works. There are new things, a few old things, and alternatives to all the products you liked before they stopped working/sat in your lines/emphasised your sun damage. With beauty as with so much else, knowledge is power. Here’s all of mine.

Note: Cosmetics have an annoying habit of getting discontinued or reformulated. My recommendations should be good for at least a few years after publication. I have also explained why things work, so I hope that even if something were discontinued, you would feel confident enough to find a replacement.

And there you have it. If you like the sound of the book, it’s available from all the usual places. I’ll also be signing copies (and of my other books) at Hatchards on Piccadilly on November 27 (I think - they haven’t put the date online yet) and at Foyles on Charing Cross Road on November 28, so come along to that if you’d like.

If you enjoyed this post, do please really kindly give it a ❤️ - it makes it more visible to non-subscribers. Thank you very much and have a lovely Friday. I’ll be back with a food post on Sunday.