Walk into any pharmacy in São Paulo on a Saturday morning and you’ll see an entire aisle of women in their forties and fifties studying the back of a serum like it’s a tax form. I’ve done it too. We’ve been told for so long that the way to stay beautiful is to find the right product that we forget how many of the most striking older women we know aren’t doing anything particularly elaborate. They’re doing a handful of small things, on most days, for decades.
I’ve been lucky enough to grow up watching different versions of older women across three cultures. The aunts and family friends back in Central Asia who looked elegant well into their seventies, the older women here in São Paulo who seem to walk into every restaurant looking lit from within, and the Chilean side of my husband’s family, whose older women have a kind of weathered, dignified glow that no cream can fake. They don’t all do the same things. But there are a few habits that show up in all three, again and again, and that the dermatology and aging research tends to back up. Below is what I’ve seen.
1. They protect their skin from the sun, daily, on autopilot
This is the one habit dermatologists keep saying is the most powerful, and the one most of us still skip. The American Academy of Dermatology notes that protecting your skin from the sun can reduce your risk of sunburn, skin cancer, and “premature skin aging like age spots, sagging, and wrinkles.” Board-certified dermatologist Elizabeth Houshmand put it more bluntly in a recent AAD survey announcement: “Sunscreen is one of the most effective tools we have to slow premature aging.”
The Central Asian aunts I grew up watching covered up out of habit. Wide hats in summer. Long sleeves. Shade by default. The Brazilians I know who age beautifully do the same in a different register, with lighter clothes and a sunscreen ritual that runs every morning regardless of plans. None of it looks like effort. It looks like a default. Speak to a dermatologist about what kind of SPF is right for your skin, but the habit itself, applied consistently, may be the closest thing visible aging has to a real lever.
2. They protect their sleep almost as carefully as their skin
It turns out the dermatology research is on the side of the older women who go to bed at a reasonable hour. In a clinical study led by Dr. Elma Baron, director of the Skin Study Center at University Hospitals Case Medical Center, poor sleepers showed measurable signs of accelerated skin aging compared to good sleepers: more fine lines, uneven pigmentation, reduced elasticity. “Sleep deprived women show signs of premature skin aging and a decrease in their skin’s ability to recover after sun exposure,” Baron said when the study was released.
I notice it about my Chilean mother-in-law every time we visit Santiago. She is in bed at a sensible hour, every night, and gets up at a sensible hour, every morning. No ritual or theory behind it. Just how she lives. By her seventies, her face has the rested quality that no product I’ve ever bought has managed to give me on three hours of sleep.
3. They either didn’t smoke, or stopped a long time ago
This one is brutal in the research, and worth being honest about. A review of epidemiological and molecular studies on tobacco and skin aging found that long-term smoking is linked to “deep wrinkles, loss of elasticity, pigmented spots, sallow coloration, and impaired wound healing.” Researchers in that literature have observed that the skin of long-term smokers in their forties can resemble the skin of non-smokers in their seventies, particularly when sun exposure is high on top of it.
This is not a piece about quitting smoking. There are people who have written that piece better than I can. The observation, gently, is just that the older women whose faces look the way most of us would secretly like our face to look at seventy were not, by and large, smokers. If you want to stop, please talk to your doctor. If you already have, your skin has been quietly thanking you for years.
4. They eat real food most of the time
I have never met an older woman whose skin looks lit from within who eats out of a wrapper for most of her meals. The Central Asian version of this is yogurt, vegetables, slow-cooked everything, and tea after lunch. The Brazilian version is rice and beans, fresh fish, fruit at breakfast, and a level of vegetable consumption the rest of the world should probably take notes on. The Chilean version is more meat and flour heavy, but still home-cooked, still fresh, still made out of recognizable things.
None of these older women are eating clean in the modern wellness-influencer sense. They are just eating actual food, made in actual kitchens, most of the time. Skin reflects what gets fed to it for decades, and what doesn’t get fed to it (the relentless ultra-processed inputs that show up as dullness and puffiness over time) seems to matter as much as what does.
5. They move their body in ordinary ways, every day
None of the older women I’m thinking of go to the gym five times a week. A few walk. A few swim. One of my husband’s great aunts in Chile has been gardening every morning for forty years and has the shoulders of someone twenty years younger. The pattern is not high-intensity. The pattern is consistent low-grade movement: blood circulating, oxygen reaching the skin, posture staying upright, the body never spending a full day in a chair.
This is the part of the list I am the worst at, by the way. I spin three times a week during lunch and I sit at a laptop the rest of the day. The older women I admire most are out moving, in whatever shape their day allows, every day, and have been for their entire adult lives. The face that gets blood flow daily for fifty years tells a different visible story than the face that doesn’t. There is no product equivalent for that.
6. They are not at war with their face
This last one is observational rather than dermatological, but it might be the most important. The older women I find beautiful are not tense about how they look. They have a face that is allowed to relax into its own age. They smile fully. They squint when they’re thinking. The muscles of the face look used, in a good way, the way the rest of their body does. The women I find harder to look at, no matter their age, are the ones whose faces look like they are being held still on purpose, either by surgery or by the stress of trying not to age.
Final thoughts
I’m not a dermatologist, and nothing here is meant as medical advice. If any of these habits would meaningfully change your routine, please talk to your own doctor or a board-certified dermatologist first.
The point of this list is smaller and more hopeful than a prescription. The most striking older women I know are not the ones with the most expensive products on the bathroom shelf. They are the ones whose ordinary days, repeated for forty years, ended up shaping a face that looks like a life well lived in.
That kind of beauty isn’t for sale. It is, however, mostly free, mostly boring, and mostly already available to you in the way you handle a regular afternoon.
