Society: wrinkled women with white hair are “invisibilized”, assures author Sophie Fontanel

Six years later An apparitionthe writer and journalist Sophie Fontanel reveals Admirable, the story of the last wrinkled woman on Earth (ed. Seghers)a novel about wrinkles. Asked about the difference between wrinkles and white hair, she answers: “The White hairs, (…) people find it beautiful. Wrinkles, there are debate.” She adds : “There are plenty of women with white hair. There are plenty of women with wrinkles. But you don’t really see them in the cinema. We are starting to see them in fashion. You don’t see them on the covers of magazines.”

The weight of society

According to her, this “population is invisible”. Conversely, we highlight “a population filtered” by photo retouching or by “aesthetic medicine”. In his tale, “the last wrinkled woman” lives in Greece and is unaware that a medication can affect all traces of skin aging. One day, she meets a young man, stunned by her face.

“What bothers this man is that he finds her beautiful. He thinks it’s wonderful, like everyone else when they see it.”explain Sophie Fontanel. She deplores: “It’s a tale, but here we are. When you see someone wrinkled (…)we tell ourselves : ‘It’s beautiful.‘ Except that society doesn’t consider it beautiful.”