ABSTRACT
Whatever we old women look and feel like naked and in private, we have appearances to keep up in public. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, the face is its mirror. People look at our faces. For the sighted, people are recognized by their faces. As we age, our faces may remain the same, and we remain recognizable—especially if we keep the same hair color and style. But some women undergo changes that make their faces less recognizable from earlier decades. The 60- to 90-year-old women whom we see around us have faces ranging from smooth to grooved, although almost all have some wrinkles. Wrinkles are an inevitable outcome of aging, but they can also be exacerbated by smoking, by exposure to ultra-violet rays, and by repeated facial expressions. As they age, women's hair strands get thinner and fewer, with perhaps a bald spot at the crown; these natural processes are exacerbated by dying hair.
