Candice Bergen and Signs of Experience

When will magazine editors get the message that we want to see our celebrity peers as they really are, and stop "photo-retouching" every bulge and wrinkle and droop out of the “older” celebrity faces we see on the pages of their magazines?

I picked up a copy of Ladies Home Journal in the doctor’s office the other day to read an article about Candice Bergen. Now, I am a real fan of Candice Bergen. I watch Boston Legal every single week – partially because I love seeing people that are my age being great at their careers, having sex, struggling with the same issues young people struggle with, and looking their age! Candice looks great on the series, but she looks 59. Tom Selleck may not have the same level of “hunkness” he once had, but he’s still one sexy guy.

Yet I look at the picture of Candice on the cover of Ladies Home Journal and she looks 25! Why? Why did they remove those wonderful laugh lines around her eyes and the slight jowls that prove she has the experience in life to offer some wisdom in her interview?

I read the interview and enjoyed what she had to say, but was distracted by even more photos of her on the page that looked as if she was barely out of the womb. If that wasn’t bad enough, I turned the page (the doctor was doing the usual doctor thing of allowing me to catch up on weeks of missed magazine articles) and there was Blythe Danner, at 61, looking like a teenager. Anyone who has seen the "Foeckers" (Meet the Parents) movies knows Blythe Danner looks fabulous for 61 – but she looks 61.

A picture of Candice Bergen on the cover of Ladies Home Journal is going to attract an audience of “older” readers. We want to relate to Candice Bergen as one of our peers. We need to see women our age showing the signs of experience on their faces, while still looking beautiful. We want to believe that it is still possible for us to be appealing, attractive, yes, even beautiful, even though we are well past ‘foreheads without frown lines’ and ‘necks without crosshatching.'

Mind you, I expect Candice may have had “some work” done in order to stay in the game. But I haven’t found any “work” that erases years like a good photo-retouching artist. Let’s let the magazine know – we want to see our peer-celebrities as they really are! That’s the only way they can be real role models for the aging population who loves them.

Comments

[C.B.]

I think that magazines are propaganda at making us think we want to look younger, but if you ask us 50+ year old women we PREFER to be older and not younger! And we like the way we look!

[nu-derm]

It's all in the art of Photoshop. Every Beauty magazine cover has to go through the editing, retouching, cleaning up of the images and get approved by the cover girl before they published it. It's been done to death and at time, you don't know what's real or not anymore.
I saw some of those celebrities in real life and trust me. They do age, some more gracefully than others and they don't look like what they appears on the cover at all.