English Version | The Grace of Becoming

There’s a moment when your reflection changes — not suddenly, not tragically, but undeniably. It might be the way light moves across your face on an ordinary afternoon, revealing something you can’t quite name. A new softness at the edges. A sharper line here, a gentler curve there. Not better. Not worse. Just different. And instead of panic, something else arrives: permission. Permission to slow down. To choose comfort over performance. To wear the perfume you love, not the one chosen for its trail of compliments. To care for your skin because it is yours, not because it is young.

It is a private negotiation, this noticing. The mirror stops feeling like a verdict and becomes more of a conversation. You find yourself asking different questions — does this make me feel like myself? — instead of the old refrain of does this make me look younger? Beauty begins to feel less like a race you are running, more like a rhythm you are learning, one that shifts in time with you.

There is a saying, passed between mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, that children grow into their faces. You notice it sometimes on the street — a child walking beside a parent, the resemblance undeniable yet incomplete. Perhaps they are a perfect blend of the two, or a miniature copy of one, but the proportions are still searching for themselves. There is something unfinished there, and of course there is: growth. Faces, like lives, need time to find their balance. The bones shift, the features settle, the gaze learns its own weight.

And perhaps that same truth extends far beyond the surface. We grow into ourselves, too — not only in the lines and angles of a face, but in the unseen cartography of who we are. In our earlier years, beauty can feel like a restless experiment. We collect colours the way others collect postcards, try on haircuts as if they were borrowed names, chase trends with the same appetite we chase new experiences. Every season is an opportunity to become someone else, or at least to see if we could.

In my own case, beauty was an open laboratory. I tried on longer hair, nails, full glam makeup — not because those things were untrue to me, but because I had no idea yet who “me” was. Honestly, I think everyone should be blonde at least once in their life, just to see what happens — perhaps even to confirm whether they do, in fact, have more fun. The same goes for a full face of glam, or a season of goth or emo eyeliner. Life is too short not to play dress-up in every style you secretly suspect you couldn’t pull off. Our bodies, after all, are avatars in the game of life — and we are more than welcome, if not encouraged, to customize them until they feel like ours. Player one has infinite options.

But at some point, something settled. Not all at once, not with a conscious decision, but gradually, like a tide pulling back to reveal the shape of the shore. We found the “skin” we felt best in — not because it was the most glamorous, nor the most daring, but because it felt like home. And when that happened, the excess began to fall away. The nails disappeared. The long hair was cut. The elaborate makeup routines became rarer, reserved for the moments we truly wanted them, rather than the moments we thought we should.

From the outside, it might have looked like a retreat — as if we were stepping back from possibility, shelving the versions of ourselves we once tried so hard to inhabit. But it wasn’t a retreat, and it wasn’t a betrayal. It was an arrival. It was recognising that the potential we chased so fiercely in our experiments was never about becoming someone else — it was about finding the coordinates of the person we were always meant to be. There was a profound relief in no longer having to try ourselves on, in no longer needing to dress as proof of who we could be. We simply were. And the selves we arrived at, quietly, without fanfare, were the ones we could live inside without question.

There was a time when looking back at old photos made me wince. Some were embarrassing, others downright offensive to my current taste. How dare I do that to my appearance — and even worse, how dare I post it online? But with distance comes tenderness. Each bad photo, each questionable look, each terrible haircut or poorly executed smokey eye brought me here. They allowed me to become who I am, to know me, to learn me — and most importantly, to be me.

With that arrival comes a certain wisdom, the kind that rarely turns up early. We imagine wisdom as something that can be summoned — learned from books, borrowed from mentors, acquired like a skill — but the truth is, it arrives slowly, shaped by time. It forms in the pauses between milestones, in the quiet accumulation of years, in the trial and error of choices made and unmade. Wisdom is not a single revelation, but a layering of understanding, a gradual shedding of illusions until what remains is something you can hold without question. It changes the way you see beauty, because beauty itself becomes less about decoration and more about recognition — recognising yourself, your history, your values, in the reflection that looks back.

This isn’t about embracing aging so much as understanding it. Age has a way of rearranging the furniture of our priorities. In youth, beauty is often built on ambition — an eagerness to try, to push, to keep pace with whatever the moment demands. But with time, ambition often gives way to intention. The urgency fades, replaced by a more deliberate touch. We no longer feel compelled to try everything; instead, we choose with precision. The red lipstick we reach for has earned its place through a hundred nights of feeling exactly right. The skincare we trust is not the one with the loudest claims, but the one that has quietly served us through seasons of change.

Somewhere along the way, the phrase “aging gracefully” enters the conversation — often spoken with a tone that is part compliment, part warning. In the beauty industry, it has long been used as both aspiration and expectation, a performance as much as a philosophy. It suggests there is a correct way to carry the years, a script to follow in order to be admired rather than pitied. But grace is not a dress code. It cannot be bought in a bottle, nor dictated by trends. True grace is deeply personal, and often looks nothing like what the culture has decided it should. For some, it might mean silver hair worn proudly and skin left bare. For others, it might mean a lifetime of red lipstick and perfectly drawn eyeliner. Grace is not about the absence of change; it is about the presence of choice.

And within that choice lies a quiet confidence — one that cannot be faked, no matter how skilled the makeup artist or how perfect the lighting. It is the knowledge that you no longer need to prove your potential, because you are already living it. It is the relief of no longer seeking permission to look the way you do. It is the comfort of knowing that every version of yourself — the experiments, the mistakes, the triumphs — has led here. Age does not diminish beauty; it refines it, distills it, until what remains is the purest expression of who you are.

Perhaps that is the real grace of becoming — not the transformation itself, but the understanding that follows. The reflection in the mirror no longer feels like a stranger you must win over, nor a project to be managed. It is simply yours. Every shift in light, every new line or softened curve, carries the story of where you’ve been. And with that understanding comes a gentler relationship to change. We may still alter our appearances — follow a trend, experiment with hair, even consider surgery or fillers — not because we must, but because we choose to. Change can be an expression of self just as much as staying the same.

Beauty has never been bound to an age, nor to a single look. It lives instead in the feeling it gives you — a feeling only you can measure. Some find it in the thrill of transformation; others in the comfort of constancy. Neither path is more correct than the other, because beauty’s truest form is personal. It is not handed down by an industry or locked in a decade’s ideal. It shifts with us, adapts to us, answers to no one but us.

To age with grace is not to avoid change, nor to surrender to it entirely. It is to hold every past version of you — the blonde experiment, the full-glam night, the terrible haircut, the bare-faced morning — as necessary parts of the same story. It is to know that you can step into a trend or step away from it, and still be entirely yourself. In recognising that, you find a freedom rarer than youth: the freedom of no longer needing to be anyone else. You have, at last, grown into your face — and it greets you in the mirror like an old friend.

Translated from the original in The Wisdom Issue, published September 2025. For full stories and credits, please see the print issue.