We Didn't Show Up to Be Replaced by Fiction

Twelve years ago, I couldn't find what I was looking for.

Not in a magazine. Not on a billboard. Not in an advertisement for anything — not for cars or cereal or cosmetics or clothes. Nowhere in the visual language of the culture I had spent thirty years helping to create was there a woman who looked like the woman I was becoming.

Silver-haired. Older. Still here. Still interested. Still worth speaking to.

She didn't exist. So, I stepped into the void and became her.

Not because I was brave. Not because I had a strategy. Because disappearing was no longer survivable, and someone had to go first.

I want to be precise about what those early years were.

They were not glamorous. They were not a pivot or a rebrand or a content strategy. They were a woman in her early fifties standing in front of a camera wearing a bikini and refusing — quietly, persistently, without a great deal of fanfare — to accept that the culture had finished with her.

The response told me everything I needed to know about how hungry women were for this.

They found me. Thousands of them. Not because I was exceptional but because I was visible in a space where they had been told there was nothing to see. Women my age, older, younger — all of them saying the same thing in different ways: I didn't know I was allowed to still be here.

That was the work. That was all of it. Showing up and being real so that other women understood they were allowed to be real too.

I wanted the void to fill. It did. And I am genuinely, wholeheartedly glad.

Over the past decade I have watched the space transform. Women stepping into visibility in their fifties, sixties, seventies — on Instagram, on catwalks, in campaigns, in magazines that had never previously considered them worth the page. Silver hair becoming a movement, then a conversation, then a given. Brands that had spent decades pretending women over forty didn't exist suddenly — slowly, imperfectly, sometimes cynically — beginning to reconsider.

My peers found their voices. Their faces. Their worth. They negotiated rates and turned down crumbs and showed up and kept showing up. I watched it happen and I thought: this is it. We are crossing a threshold. The culture is actually changing.

I still believe some of that is true.

But I have also been watching something else happen. And I think it is time to say it clearly.

We were not crossing a threshold.

We were being used.

Let me be precise about what I mean — because this is not bitterness and it is not a generalisation. It is the specific, documented experience of a woman who has been inside this industry for over a decade, who has negotiated her own rates and read her own contracts and asked every question the brands hoped she wouldn't ask.

The brands that came to us — many of them — did not want to show older women to the world. They wanted to show older women to older women. Quietly. Invisibly. As targeted advertising, aimed at our demographic, rarely appearing on their public feeds, very rarely part of their brand story, rarely evidence of their values. Our faces were a strategy. Not a statement.

I created content for some of the biggest beauty brands in the world. My face ran as advertising to women like me, globally, for years. On their feeds? Rarely. In their campaigns? Occasionally, when it suited. On their websites as permanent representation? Almost never.

You are useful, the industry said without saying it, but not visible. You are a tool, not a voice. You are a targeted demographic, not a human being we are proud to stand beside.

I said no to a long list of offers that didn't meet that standard. I was ghosted for it. I was told I was difficult. I was passed over for women who would accept the crumbs because they didn't yet know they were crumbs.

I understand that. I was there once too.

The ghosting is not personal. It is structural. And the structure has not changed as much as we were led to believe.

And now there is something new.

Right now, in the comments sections and group threads where older women have built community over the past decade, a conversation is running that turns my stomach.

AI-generated mature influencers.

Fictional older women, constructed by algorithms, indistinguishable from real ones, that brands are beginning to use because they are cheaper, more compliant, and infinitely controllable. They do not ask for contracts. They do not negotiate usage. They do not say no. They do not get tired or grieve or need to care for a parent or step away from the camera for a year because life demands it.

They are the logical endpoint of everything I have been watching for twelve years: erase the real older women, replace them with a fiction that serves the brand's needs perfectly, and call it representation.

Platforms are not labelling this content clearly. Our peers — women who have spent years building their confidence and their visibility — are now measuring themselves against images of women who do not exist. The cage is back. It has just been rebuilt in a different material.

And the algorithm is helping. The same algorithm that built our audiences is now burying us in favour of the younger, the smoother, the more frictionless. Real older women, with real lives and real opinions and real faces that have been lived in — disappearing in real time, replaced by content that is easier to monetise and impossible to argue with.

I have been quieter on Instagram over the past year or two.

Some of that is caregiving — I am the primary carer for my elderly mother, and the bandwidth required to maintain a thriving social presence has gone to her, to the people I love, to the work that actually matters. I do not apologise for that. I would make the same choice again.

But some of it is this: I got tired of swimming upstream for an industry that was using the current against me.

I got tired of performing visibility for a platform that was making me invisible.

I got tired of the scripts, the briefs, the social media managers young enough to be my grandchildren telling me what my audience wanted to hear. I know what my audience wants to hear. I have been in conversation with them for over a decade. They want the truth. They have always wanted the truth. That is why they found me in the first place.

So here is what I have decided.

I am going to be even more precise about what I say yes to.

The brands that want to show me — actually show me, on their feeds, in their campaigns, as genuine representation of the women they claim to value — I will work with those brands. Gladly. With full commitment and the considerable skills I have accumulated over decades.

The brands that want my face for their targeted ads while keeping their public image younger and smoother — no. Not anymore. Not for any rate.

The briefs that ask me to perform a version of ageing that is palatable and non-threatening and careful not to say anything that might make anyone uncomfortable — no. That is not what I am here to do. It was never what I was here to do.

I stepped into the void twelve years ago to show women like me that we existed. That we were worth showing. That the culture's silence about us was a lie.

I am not going to spend the next decade whispering that message in a targeted ad that no one else can see.

Something else is happening for me now. Something I will say more about in time.

I have spent the past few years writing. Not content. Not captions. Not briefs. Writing — the long, difficult, necessary kind. The kind that takes everything you know about a life and asks you to be precise about what it meant.

The cultural commentator has been here all along, underneath the silver hair and the bikini and the content calendar. She is stepping forward now.

She has things to say that will not fit in a caption.

She is not interested in the algorithm's approval.

And she is, for the first time in a long time, entirely herself.

The void I stepped into is full now.

I am glad.

I am also watching it carefully.

Because a void full of fiction is not the same as a void full of truth.

And we did not do all of this — the showing up, the negotiating, the refusing to disappear — so that the industry could replace us with a version of ourselves that never gets tired, never says no, and never, ever asks an inconvenient question.

We did it to be seen.

Really seen.

And that work is not finished.