Both young and older women were cautioned against using cosmetics, but the rationales for each stage of life differed. By the early twentieth century, it was more common for women's periodicals and beauty manuals to promote the idea that older women must combat fading looks by almost any means necessary so long as they did not attempt to foolishly – and futilely – recreate the charms of their youthful selves. Women's magazines and advertising that featured older women celebrities offered up a virtually impossible ideal of youthful appearance maintained into older age purely through a daily regimen of undetectable and hygienic body care. Discussions of beautification for older women shift from the sensation and pitying attitudes associated with Madame Rachel's salon and her mature clients around the 1860s. In this chapter, I examine the differing beauty strategies for older women described in beauty manuals, women's magazines and advertisements by the final decades of the century, which both offered hope for lifelong beauty and, at the same time, blamed women's character, thoughts and mental health, in addition to their hygiene and grooming methods, for any degradation in their appearance as they aged. Finally, I consider two novels published at mid-century, Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son (1848) and George Eliot's Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), focusing on the revulsion associated with women's ageing and loss of beauty in order to exemplify the minimal scope afforded for women to age well until much later in the century.

But at what age might a Victorian or Edwardian woman be regarded as ‘old’? Life expectancy at birth rose to the upper forties by the end of the nineteenth century, though this figure is skewed substantially by infant mortality rates (Heath 9). Most people who survived infancy could expect to live into their fifties, and it was not uncommon for people to survive into their eighties and nineties. Kay Heath explains that conceptions of what constituted middle age, however, did not strictly accord with life expectancies and varied for men and women. She suggests that literary evidence often puts women as nearing middle age at 30, particularly as this marked the point at which women's value on the marriage market would rapidly dwindle; this contrasts with men, who could still be regarded as eligible bachelors and as not yet having reached middle age at 40 (Heath 10–11).