• Helen Mirren, 78, shared the compliment she finds insulting.
  • “‘You look good for your age’ is patronizing,” she said.
  • The actress loves aging and also shares the “magic” of getting older.

There are many reasons to compliment Dame Helen Mirren. You can praise her acting talent, her activism, her wisdom, but telling her she looks great—for her age—isn’t the kind sentiment you may think it is. In fact, the Golda star revealed that she finds the comment insulting.

“‘You look good for your age’ is patronizing,” she said in a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK. “It’s insulting. We hate that compliment. We really hate it. And be prepared, if you use that phrase, to be dissed in a major way.”

Mirren, 78, isn’t alone in her disdain for the phrase. In fact, Jennifer Aniston, 54, recently shared that she “can’t stand” when someone says it to her. “It should actually be: you look great—period,” she told British Vogue in June. “It drives me bananas, I can’t stand it ... that’s a habit of society that we have these markers like, ‘Well, you’re at that stage, so for your age… I don’t even understand what it means.”

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Angela Basset feels the same way. “I think when we take care of ourselves, we do look good for our age, whatever age that is, you know?” the actress, 65, told InStyle in January 2022. Similarly, supermodel Paulina Porizkova has voiced her concern over the normalized insertion of the word “still” into compliments of older women, such as: “You still look great.”

“I know it’s kindly meant. But those of you who use the term STILL when commenting on looks or a person’s abilities, are actually perpetuating ageism,” she wrote on Instagram in April 2022.

Mirren would have to agree, especially because she finds aging—or “growing up,” as she’s called it in the past—to be “magic,” she recently told Vogue. “My mom did say something really wise to me when I was in my 30s,” she recounted. “She said never be worried about getting older because an amazing thing happens. When you’re 20, you hope turning 40 never happens. And then when you turn 40, you realize it’s great and you don’t want to be 20 again.”

She continued: “At every age, you lose some things but you gain other things. That’s the kind of magic that happens, so deal with it. You either die young, or you get old.”

Why not own and enjoy the latter?

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Kayla Blanton

Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.