Why Boudoir is for women over 40
I think most women reach a point in their lives where they suddenly realise they’ve spent an awful lot of time looking after everyone else.
You build a career, raise children, look after your family, organise the holidays, remember the birthdays, ferry people around, keep the house vaguely functioning and somehow manage to know where everyone’s shoes are, even when they’re 25 and perfectly capable of finding them themselves.
And you do it because you love them. It’s not a hardship, and for a lot of us, being needed becomes such a normal part of life that we don’t even notice how far down the list we’ve put ourselves.
Then, somewhere around our 40s, 50s or 60s, things start to change. The children grow up, relationships change, careers change, our bodies certainly change, and sometimes life throws something at us that we didn’t see coming. A divorce, an empty nest, a health scare, or simply a birthday that makes you stop and think “How on earth did I get to this age?”
And suddenly there’s a little more space.
Which sounds wonderful, until you realise you’re not entirely sure what you want to put in it.
This is the bit I see over and over again in my studio, particularly with the women who nearly didn’t come.
They arrive telling me they’re not photogenic, that they’ve never liked having their photograph taken, that their body isn’t what it used to be and that they’re really not sure this sort of thing is for them.
Some of them have spent years putting themselves off until they lose weight, their hair grows back, they feel better about themselves or life becomes a little less complicated.
And then we take the photographs.
Not to make them look like somebody else, but to show them what I can already see when they walk through my door.
A woman who has lived a life. A woman who has loved, worked, raised children, survived things, changed, grown and probably spent a ridiculous amount of time worrying about whether everyone else is alright.
And then she sees herself on the screen.
Really sees herself.
And that moment gets me every single time, because sometimes she goes completely quiet.
Sometimes she laughs. Sometimes there are tears.
For both of us. And quite often she looks at me and says, “Is that really me?”
Yes my lovely – It bloody well is.
And that’s the thing I wish more women understood. You don’t have to wait until you are thinner, younger, fitter, more confident or somehow more deserving of being photographed.
You don’t have to become somebody else first.
You are already the woman in those photographs.
My job is simply to help you see her.
So if you’ve been thinking about doing something for yourself and then finding approximately 47 perfectly sensible reasons why you shouldn’t, perhaps it’s worth asking yourself a different question.
Not “Why would I do this?”
But “What if I did?”
Because your moment doesn’t have to be some mythical point in the future when everything is finally sorted and you’re completely happy with every inch of yourself.
It can be now.
And perhaps, after all those years of putting everyone else first, you’re allowed to have a little bit of the spotlight
