Former Blue Peter presenter Zoe Salmon is 42 and expecting her first child. Decades on from hosting the BBC children’s programme and now carrying an actual other human life inside her, as you might expect, she looks quite different.
Every tabloid has used the same word to describe her altered appearance: according to the UK press, Zoe Salmon is now ‘unrecognisable’.
‘Looks almost unrecognisable. For god’s sake, she’s 42 and pregnant now so obviously she’ll change,’ commented one reader. Perhaps [the] headline should read: ‘Warning people’s looks may change over the years,’ added another.
Days later, the actress Bridget Fonda was dubbed similarly 'unrecognisable' when she was caught by the paparazzi walking along the street after 12 years of actively avoiding the public eye.
At the top of a Daily Mail article, a photo of Fonda with a Hollywood sheen on a red carpet was directly contrasted with a photo of Fonda with grey hair, no makeup, and a casual outfit over a decade later.
The positioning encouraged reader analysis of her weight, style, and age. 'A lot of older, fat women were beautiful in their youth,' one comment read. 'What the headline really means is JUDGE THIS WOMAN! None of us looks like we did 12 years ago, and she, like all other women, should be free from this kind of toxic misogyny,' defended another.
The word ‘unrecognisable’ has, seemingly, become a euphemism for celebrities ageing or gaining weight. Everyone from the Matilda child star Mara Wilson to Outnumbered’s Ramona Marquez to This Country’s Daisy Cooper has been accused of shapeshifting as the hands of time ticked on.
Obviously, to call someone ‘unrecognisable’ is to dramatize the truly quite mundane activity of time passing. If these articles were headlined ‘Zoe Salmon Dies Hair’ or ‘Mara Wilson Is Now An Adult’ they wouldn’t be as entertaining—or as clickable.
‘Unrecognisable’ offers the opportunity for unkind analysis of these celebrities’ appearances. Really, these are just the ‘before and after’ articles that fell out of favour in the early 00s wearing a different hat.
When surveying photos of someone from when they were 18 to when they’re 45, the most likely thing to be commented upon is how they’ve aged. When images of someone whose weight has shifted are lined up alongside one another, the comment section is filled with often hurtful analysis of their body types.
‘She was hot when she was younger, look at the abs!!’ read one comment beneath images of Daisy Cooper when she was only a teenager.
To have your looks commented upon in any regard is exhausting. And, with the stigma that still surrounds ageing, many women find it tough not to compare their current appearance to their younger selves.
‘Unrecognisable’ has seemingly become the phrase that allows tabloids to trojan horse unhelpful and unkind discourse about celebrities’ appearances into public discourse without being bombarded with outraged criticism by readers that know this is wrong.
But really, these articles all still say the same thing as they did decades ago in magazines that shamelessly plastered women’s fluctuating weights and increasing ages across their covers: Look! She was fat, now she’s thin. Look! She was young, now she’s getting old.
These comparisons aren’t progressive or helpful. They encourage nastiness and simply highlight the most banal aspects of human existence. Without surgical intervention, everyone will get wrinkles. Our skin will sag and our collagen levels will decrease. It’s not special, or interesting, and it certainly doesn’t make somebody ‘unrecognisable’.
Ageing is normal, body types changing after puberty is normal, and having these processes sensationalised for clicks only makes a spectacle of women who are going through everyday biological processes.
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