Here are Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith and Cheryl Ladd. You have to have been watching TV back in the three-channel era to remember these names as the stars of Charlie’s Angels (after Farrah Fawcett had left): the American series about three gorgeous female private detectives chasing danger in tight flared trousers.
Back then, in the mid-Seventies, Jackson and Ladd were in their twenties and Smith was a practically over-the-hill 30 years old. Now Smith is 80; the baby of the trio, Ladd, is 74. Half a century has passed since they were the bedroom poster most requested by adolescent boys (probably) and now they’re TV legends, happy to reunite for the show’s 50th anniversary and answer questions on feminism, bikinis versus swimsuits and how times have changed in the industry.
Now, the big question is: do you look at these pictures and think, “Wow, they look amazing for their age; look at Jaclyn Smith — she’s 80 for Pete’s sake. Who would believe that!”? Or do you look at these three women and think (while possibly forwarding the picture to your like-minded friend, with three exclamation marks), “This is not quite right. This is a bit wrong.”?
Smith, Jackson and Ladd in 1978Getty images
Because there is no one standard, received point of view any more when it comes to the ageing female face and body. You are either pro-intervention or anti. You’re in the “plastic makes perfect” camp, where seeing women who have subverted the ageing process leaves you impressed — and baffled by the idea that anyone wouldn’t take advantage of every available procedure to keep sagging jowls, corrugated foreheads, crow’s feet and marionette lines at bay. Or you’re in the “maintain the Forth Road Bridge as best you can but don’t try to turn it into Versailles” camp. And in Hollywood and LA taking the latter view in 2026 is a bit like drinking martinis at lunch: quaint, almost certainly British behaviour to be observed with amusement but secretly pitied.
This debate is not new, but it is what now discreetly divides the female population. And since Mounjaro has been added into the body-altering mix, we’re getting to the point where the two tribes — Plastic Makes Perfect (or, why the hell wouldn’t you?) and the Tell Me You Can’t See She Looks Like a Freak (and ten years older for losing the weight) — are as different as Magas from Greens or the head of the Cottesmore Hunt from a Dubai influencer.
Fashion newsletter
The best products, fashion tips and exclusive offers to keep you in style.
Sign up with one click
On the one hand you have women delighting in Kylie Jenner’s honesty in not just admitting she’s had a breast enhancement but directing her followers to the specific surgeon — because why would you hide such information unless you were ashamed, and why would you be ashamed of having amazing-looking fake breasts in 2026? That “totally natural, all my own, yes, thank you” era no longer cuts any ice among a significant number of females under the age of 60 (and some older ones too: Jenner’s 70-year-old mother, Kris, last year acknowledged a second facelift, saying it was “time for a refresh”).
For this group there is no honour in managing what you’ve got, no extra glory in looking good for your age without a facelift and whatever tweakment (knee lift, armpit bulge eraser) is in the ascendant. The aim is to get in there as early as possible with Botox, to touch up your face IRL as you would your Instagram pics, and if you don’t at least get your teeth veneered the assumption is you’re too poor.
Kylie Jenner has admitted to having breast enhancement surgeryGetty images
Her mother, Kris, acknowledged her second facelift last yearXavier Collin/Image Press Agency / SplashNews.com
In the other camp are the women who still (and, you know, maybe it is starting to sound slightly old-fashioned) talk about women in the opposite camp “ruining” their faces. They wince at the light bouncing off a recently topped-up Botox ice-rinked forehead. They cringe at the very slight adjustments to the faces of actresses on the Oscars red carpet who last year still looked like themselves and this year look like someone very similar but not the same. Don’t sue me, British actress in that series on TV, but even that very subtle work has — if you’re Camp Resist — removed something lovely and replaced it with something animatronic. Maybe we imagined it.
There used to be a whiff of something moral about the objectors’ argument that it’s wrong to interfere with what nature gave you, that it’s unnecessary to go under the knife or spend good money on altering your face with a view to looking younger than you are. That’s all gone now. No one judges the interventionists for their interventions; we just think, “Those aren’t my people” — unless their job depends on looking reasonable in HD. (In which case, who are we to stand in the way of their career longevity? See: Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link — one of the first “good for on-camera” facelifts.)
It’s clear that you’re not a worse feminist and you don’t lack a sense of humour if you’re in the PMP camp — as the very surgically assisted Katherine Ryan has proved. You don’t lack self-awareness, as Demi Moore demonstrated in The Substance when she played a woman for whom looking youthful to survive in Hollywood became an obsession.
Katherine Ryan in 2023Lia Toby/Getty Images
Ryan made the point, in an interview with Prue Leith (of course in the non-intervention camp; of course horrified and saddened at the number of young women changing the size of their breasts and the shape of their features), that Ryan’s generation was brought up to think of their bodies as a trend. She’s 42 and joked that had she not been so busy when the fashion for enhanced bottoms was at its peak, she’d be sitting higher in her chair.
Maybe that’s no different from plastering your face in Elizabethan white arsenic in the name of fashion. But if you’re on the other side of the coin it feels different, like a separate philosophy. It goes hand in hand with: let’s not eat lunch, let’s not have a drink, let’s stay out of the sun, let’s stay out of the water, let’s be careful of our hair (even if that means not going on the swing). Mummy has to go to a Brazilian place and she’ll come back with bandages on her face and you might cry when you see her again, but, listen, Mummy has to do this in case Daddy goes off with someone with a tighter jawline.
The issue here is that — and the appearances of the Charlie’s Angels actresses prove it — the population are now seeing on two different planes. Some of us look at an 80-year-old woman with lush long hair (can we assume it’s a wig?) and gasp with delight and respect for their commitment. Some of us (often older but not always) feel like you feel when Donald Trump says the unthinkable and no one reacts.
If it is better to look like sandblasted you than to have crow’s feet, hooded eyes, a lined forehead and a frilly jawline, then we cannot see it. It’s like the emperor’s new clothes. We would rather end up looking like Dame Edna’s sidekick Madge than an abstract version of ourselves that has melted. When your eyes look different in your head, your smile has been lifted and shifted, you look (to this tribe) deformed, there’s no other word for it. But that’s OK because most of the people don’t see it that way.
Every so often there’s a flutter of excitement in Camp Denial when an actress (it’s always an actress) crosses the floor and admits to having messed up her face with fillers (Courteney Cox in 2023) or regretting a facelift, like Sharon Osbourne, who admitted that one in 2021 had left “one eye here and one eye there and my mouth was all skewwhiff”. These are the moments the naturals chalk up to the beginning of the slow U-turn back to healthy normal.
Courteney Cox has opted for fillers in the pastGetty images
And every so often an actress will stick her head above the parapet — such as Salma Hayek Pinault last year, aged 58 — pull her hair back and insist that her interviewer checks her for scars (“I have [had] no plastic surgery… no filler!”), which is slightly different. She wants the credit and we can only assume feels that opinion moving in the direction of intervention-free beauty. No hair extensions either. Jessie Buckley, the 36-year-old Oscar-winning star of Hamnet, is widely recognised for having a natural appearance free of filler and Botox, and that bodes well too. A face that crinkles and a post-pregnancy body that lit up awards season is just what the deniers need.
But even if the thirtysomethings draw a line under it right now, it’ll take some time for this juggernaut to turn around. Maybe we’re entering the age of telling people’s age by precisely how much work they’ve had. Charlie’s Angels, 74 to 80. Bang on.