I’m starting to notice changes now. I’m giving less fucks about dieting. I’m being pro-active at work. I’m actually happier in myself and I’ve finally mastered the art of taking a selfie.
Perhaps because my 30’s are looming, I have, within my friendship group some younger friends to which I sometimes find myself being the mother hen: I tell them to dump their useless boyfriends and free themselves for their twenties and, in turn, they teach me to contour. I encourage them not to fret about being childless as the first of their friends pops one out, they school me in creating a Kylie Jenner lip. I calm their worries of what to do with their life, they teach me how to take a selfie.
Now this may sound ridiculous but I cannot tell you how I struggled with the simple task of taking a selfie. It’s an generation thing. Last year my colleagues and I went bowling for a leaving do. I discovered two facts that night: 1) I’m a pretty awesome (average) bowler (and I thought I was waltzing into my thirties without a skill) and 2) Young people spend 90% of their time capturing their youthful, glowing appearance on their phone. The other 10% is spent touching up said youthful looks with a carefully chosen filter. There they all were missing my strikes, too occupied with Snapchatting their wrinkle free face next to a Mojito.
Don’t get me wrong I’ve no desire to start wasting my social life cataloging my outfit choice for a G&T down the local but I have spent many an evening, scrolling through Facebook utterly perplexed by how photogenic everyone else seems to be when I appear to have seven chins and eye bags.
I’ve since learnt (thanks to my young friends) that I was foolishly snapping away in the wrong lighting with -shock horror!-no filter. What a dickhead. So I began to experiment with Snapchat and Instagram and I suppose I noticed a slight improvement. But all this effort was put to shame when Mother sprung up on my timeline. There she was, beaming away, looking the grand old age of…17. Naturally I thought she’d spent her life savings on several face and eye lifts but that assumption was abruptly put to bed when she flung open the door on Mother’s Day looking like her weathered old self. Just kidding Mother – you’re beautiful and always look sublime but let’s face it – you’re not in your late teens.
“Oh it’s this app!” She explained with much enthusiasm “InstaHot or Instantly Beautiful or – two secs let me show you.” Out pops her pink iPhone 6, text font large as Everest, glasses teetering on the end of her contoured nose “Here we go, Instabeauty!”
The next few hours were dwindled away slimming my face, narrowing the nose, widening my eyes resulting in me, little old podgy me, looking not too dissimilar to Ariel from The Little Mermaid. Now you’d think I’d waste no time in uploading my creation but no, I decided firmly against it. This pleased mother as she felt a sudden change would cause suspicion and urged me to gradually change my features so as not to encourage rumours of surgery and/or tampering with photos.
I can safely say I will never upload an Instabeautied me, I don’t want to look perfect, I just wanted to know what I was doing wrong – surely the whole world didn’t suddenly look like extremely slim, extremely flawless, bug eyed Disney Princesses? Though the skill of Selfie Taking is now firmly part of my arsenal and it is quite fascinating from time to time, I can assure you that should you hop on my timeline at 5am, there I’ll be, grinning back at you in freshly uploaded photo, mascara down my face, all seven chins rolling, swigging from a bottle of Prosecco and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
