‘Ageing can be compared to a bereavement’

Presenter and campaigner Katie Piper has told an audience at the Hay Festival in Wales that “ageing can be compared to a bereavement.”

The former model has had hundreds of surgeries to repair damage to her face and eyesight following an attack on the orders of her ex-boyfriend, which took place when she was 24 in 2008.

Piper’s latest book, which is published on Friday, is titled Still Beautiful: On Age, Beauty and Owning Your Space.

The 41-year-old said: “Women age out of the male gaze. I was ripped from the male gaze at 24. I didn’t just become invisible. I became a target for people saying derogatory things.”

She expanded on her description of ageing being like a bereavement: “Sometimes we know we’re losing somebody or something, and it’s slow, it’s gradual, and when it’s ageing, we look down at our hands, we see they look different.

“We catch ourselves in the shop window, and everything’s changed.

Piper, who is also a presenter on the BBC programme Songs of Praise and ITV’s Loose Women. said she had recently been asked if writers minded if they mentioned her age.

“It was shocking, but not surprising. This was because I had been reminded at such a young age the currency and the power a woman holds when she is considered either beautiful or young, and now here I was going through the second phase of youth slipping away and feeling, once again, society’s judgement and the label that they were going to put on to me.”

She said: “I wanted to write this book… to really tell people where I have found myself, not just when I was no longer considered beautiful, but when I was told that I was losing my power because I was no longer a young woman.

“Among my peers, I’m not the most beautiful, I’m not the youngest, but I’m one of the most powerful.”

In the book, Piper writes: “What if ageing is the magic key to letting go of other people’s expectations and truly starting to live how we want to live.”

She told the audience: “It makes you in control of your own destiny. And that scares some people, because if we are no longer insecure if we’re confident, if we’re not chasing something unpaid, what can they sell to us? What overpriced cream and diet and contraption will we spend our money on?

“We really glamorise youth. We talk about our 20s, [as] the time of your life, the best years. Okay, I had a very different 20s than most, because I was in the hospital, but your average 20-year-old, it’s actually the time for mistakes… where you’re least financially secure, you’re least experienced. You don’t really have as much confidence to put boundaries in.”

She said she felt positive about getting older.

“I’m going to be 42 in October. I’m still incredibly young to many, and old and past it to some. You realise, ‘I know who I am.’ I have a strong sense of self and identity.This is the heyday. This is the time of my life. So I can only imagine what’s on 50s and 60s and the decades beyond. I feel excited by that second chapter.”

Piper, who mentors victims of acid attacks through the Katie Piper Foundation, recounted two stories when she had faced discrimination because of the way she looked.

In one incident, some men in a van whistled at her when they saw her from behind but then threw a sandwich at her when they saw her face (she was wearing a plastic mask at the time following some treatment) and another time, a first date walked out on her in a London restaurant leaving her to pick up a tab that was more than £700.

But she said: “You need to realise, on the whole, people are really good. Seventeen years ago, when I did that first cutting edge documentary (Channel 4’s Katie: My Beautiful Face), what it did is it opened me up to the good side of society. Up until that point, I had seen true evil in mankind, but only in two people (her attackers).”

She said if she had to give one message to her younger self, it would be: “If you’ve ever felt less than… you’ve hated yourself or felt ashamed, it was never you. It was society, consumerism and capitalism. It was beneficial to someone, somewhere, to hold you down.

“Whether that was in a relationship, a corporate company or a brand, it was never you. You were always fine just as you are, and you always will be.”