This comedian says Aussie women give up on looking good after 40. Is he joking?

By KATE HUNTER

You know how all French women over fifty look like Catherine Deneuve?

And all Italian women between nineteen and ninety look like Sophia Loren?

The question has to be asked: do Australian women blow out the candles on their fortieth birthday cake, eat the whole thing, pull on their trackies and spend the rest of their lives schlepping around shopping centres getting short haircuts.

Or does it just seem like that?

Comedian Lawrence Mooney said on  Agony of Life, Adam Zwar’s latest series for the ABC, that Australian women don’t look after themselves as well as their European counterparts.

To paraphrase, Mooney reckons we let ourselves go. After ‘a certain age,’ it’s all elasticised waists, flat shoes and a decent moisturiser with SPF30 instead of make-up.

Mooney says it’s as if we’ve given up. Just take a quick stroll down the Champs Elysees and see how many women you see in their Bonds wide-leg trackies? Not many!

BUT head for an Aussie shopping centre and he says it’s frumps as far as the eye can see.

Is this true? And if it is, why is it so?

We could spend all day dissecting this. And I started last night at a three-generational family dinner.

I put the question out there, ‘Do you think middle aged women in Europe look better than middle aged women in Australia?’

‘Not in Lithuania,’ said my sister-in-law. They’d spent a few months in Europe last year.

‘They have hard lives,’ said my brother-in-law, somewhat defensively (he’s of Lithuanian extraction).

‘The women in Paris were gorgeous, though,’ he said.

‘But the Champs Elysees isn’t Europe,’ pointed out my husband, ‘As tourists, we don’t go so much to the daggy ordinary places. Maybe the women slack off there?’

It was all a bit depressing. I guess I wanted the discussion to go in the general direction of, ‘Noooo! Australian women are so naturally gorgeous and so full of joie de vivre that we look GREAT in our trackies and short haircuts.’

Either that, or ‘Really? Look around us. Every woman here looks FABULOUS.’ But we were at a Chinese restaurant at Coolangatta, so that wasn’t going to happen. Importantly, I’d like to point out that none of the men looked that hot either.

I think Catherine Denueve was right when she said, “Getting ready takes so much longer as you get older. That the older you get, the earlier you have to get up to get ready just to look OK.”

But let’s remember Catherine Denueve is an actress, her beauty regime is a big part of her job. Similarly, Australian actresses look fine, unless they’re caught makeup-less at the fruit shop. Then they look like anyone else.

Perhaps Australian women are happy the way we are. Maybe our self-esteem isn’t so tied up in the way we present ourselves to the world. Maybe it just doesn’t matter.

Do you think Australian women take less trouble with their appearance than their European counterparts as they get older?