Hilary Fannin: My new aggressive maturity has me reaching for the eyebrow dye

Oh my giddy aunt. I’m generally not a huge fan of spring: it is a season synonymous with broken promises. It’s all butterflies and apple blossom. Then, just when you think you’re walking through a Japanese animation, the whole edifice comes tumbling down in a burst of hailstones. But today, things are looking up.

Do you remember those facile posters we used to pin on our bedroom walls and the peel-back stickers we used to plaster all over our schoolbags? Stickers saying “Today is the beginning of the rest of your life”? Well, they were right (dull and unimaginative, pious and derivative, but right). Blame the gambolling lambs, the tincture of sunlight whispering through the cloud, but I’m feeling kind of frisky today, feeling renewed.

I’m about to celebrate my 53rd birthday, and my response to time’s arrow, swiftly hurtling towards its target, is to gently encourage each year to be more liberating, more adventurous than the last.

I read somewhere that women of a certain age experience, along with other symptoms of the “change of life”. (What a phrase. “Change of life, anyone?” “Oh, yes please, I’d like a beach house in Malibu, in which to contain my startling bursts of lachrymosity, a vegan shaman to interpret my mood swings, and an eco car.”)

Shifting mindsets

Where was I? Oh yeah. I read somewhere that increased levels of testosterone in maturing women, and a corresponding drop in progesterone, can subtly shift our mindsets.

One potentially positive side to this hormonal rebalancing (which can, let’s face it, also hijack us with startling flurries of facial hair), is a drive to begin to release ourselves from the ties that bind, be they domestic or professional.

They say we start looking outwards, over the hooded heads of our offspring/line managers/yawning spouses, towards a more aggressively determined future.

And so, in a spirit of moustachioed rejuvenation, and in celebratory mood (really because I am given to hope that today the country too will show that she is growing up and losing her inhibitions) I had my eyebrows dyed.

You what? Okay, it’s not a particularly poetic response to the sedimentary process of laying down another year. It’s not smart, it’s not feminist, not even vaguely liberated. But apparently (and the word “apparently” is significant here), an eyebrow dye can be as youthfully enhancing as a facelift.

What they don’t tell you is that an eyebrow dye can also make you look like you’ve just had a dreadful shock. Or like you want to hurt someone very badly. Saturnine and brooding I am not, post-treatment. I could pass for a first cousin of Brezhnev.

Sad really, that with all that extra will, all those superfluous hormones, all that diligent research into the positive aspects of ageing, I chose to spend my afternoon turning myself into a pale and saggy imitation of Frida Kahlo, but without her talent, her cheekbones or her maverick nature.

“Eyebrows are it,” the beautician told me. “It’s all about the eyebrows.” Well, that’s good to know. At least it knocks existential angst out of the parkway.

Aggressive maturity

I’m going to work at using my newfound aggressive maturity, to temper my insatiable curiosity for make-up advice and diet porn. No more will I read those seductive little online articles that pop up for your perusal when you are chasing a word count.

Yesterday’s online confection, the dietary advice of an actor I’ve never heard of, will be my last. The actor is a woman in my age bracket, who apparently “looks 20 years younger!!!” is a former 1980s television detective, recently turned author of a lifestyle book.

I read a couple of tips on achieving a younger-looking you: snippets, extracts from her stress-free routines to encourage radiant youthfulness. First, you have to sleep for hours on end (preferably between gossamer sheets next to a gelded lover who won’t be bothering you in the night). Then you get up, slip into your yoga pants and don’t, under any circumstances, eat your breakfast (radical, she knows).

Then you go to the gym, the hot yoga bay and the steam room, until it’s time for a lunch of miso broth and fairy dust.

I can’t remember what you’re supposed to do in the afternoon, but before dinner (of two dancing prawns and some mermaid juice), you have to run up and down the stairs at least 10 times to get your metabolism going. Terrific.

I’m going to run myself down to the polling booth and, throwing calorific caution to the wind, pick up a bottle of something bubbly. There just might be a change of life to celebrate.

• Famished Castle by Hilary Fannin, directed by Rough Magic's Lynne Parker, runs at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, until May 23rd. paviliontheatre.ie