I have seen the future of the female face and it is Bill Murray.

Twitter and I saw him on the Oscars red carpet—I’m allowed 10 minutes of intellectual slumming before my appalled husband shuts it down—and we all said, “What the #$*@! happened to his face?”

I love Murray and his stance, which is sarcastic and funny and harsh, but the man looked 102. Was he ill, fretted Twitter. With his shrivelled patchy skin and the long flyaway white hair that Hollywood usually only allows to convey eccentric genius or your basic Custodian Child Killer, he is what we will all look like eventually unless we take steps, and not baby steps either.

I mention this on International Women’s Day because women are said to be especially terrified of visible ageing, of desiccation.

I disagree. As women move into the workplace, one hopes to its most senior levels and highest paycheques, men and women will finally be equal in the race for the monetary and emotional gifts that compensate for a face that looks like the north face of the Eiger.

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Both men and women are having surgical incursions, which would be fine with a plausible result. But there they are with little equal signs beside their eyes, a forehead like an ice rink and cheeks that pop out suddenly, the way fake breasts do.

Take Premier Kathleen Wynne, who looks terrific at 60, and Bruce Springsteen, who turns 65 this year but has been spackled and looks tight and weird.

Men and women should give up on youthenizing. No cosmetic surgery makes you look anything but peculiar and self-despising.

In 1973, American actress Kim Novak made a TV movie, Third Girl from the Left, about a Vegas chorus girl being viciously mocked for being over the hill. Fully 41 years later, Novak at the Oscars at 81, was humiliated in real life for a facelift so tight that her mouth could scarcely emit words.

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Novak was taut, Murray was oblivious and they were both savaged for it.

I have been thinking about this since my dermatologist, a nice man, a Pasteur of mystery rashes and moles, went strange on me.

I think of dermatologists as externalists whose work is unguent-based, but he got internal, suggesting, apropos of nothing, that he take my blood, stir it up and inject a kind of slurry back into my face. And this is how naïve I am. “Why?” I said.

It’ll enhance collagen, he said, which sounds nice but I hadn’t been aware I was lacking in collagen which is the bendy stuff your ears are based on.

To me, my face is my own—my father’s nose, my mother’s lazy eye—but to him it’s a disc of possibilities. He told me the procedure would erase my “tear troughs,” which mystified me as I’m not a crier. He meant undereye circles.

I asked my young and highly fetching children about this and they exploded with laughter. “Ha ha, that’s a vampire facial, the Kardashians had that.”

Watch Kim Kardashian, 33, endure it online. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA43uMvluno The doctor extracts a fat tube of blood, puts it in a tarted-up centrifuge so the yellow “platelets and fibrin” float to the top, and shoots this froth back into the patient’s face through hundreds of fresh tiny needle holes.

HLN's A.J. Hammer asks an expert if Kim Kardashian's "vampire facial" really works and if it's worth the pain.

It is agonizing. Kardashian, poor creature, whimpers with pain and the photographer is retching. Your face looks like a freshly mown lawn, if grass could bleed.

And then you cross your fingers and hope to look stiff with fresh collagen and, oh, six, maybe seven, months younger. In my case, this would take me back to last summer when I was writing a column on—how odd, it was Mayor Rob Ford—and looking just as grim as I do right now.

That said, resistance is futile. Sooner or later we’re all going to look like Murray.

To what extreme depends on the material you start with. The essayist Jean Kerr happily summed up the result of years of assiduous moisturizing as a tabloid confession: “Once I was considered plain—today I am a mess.”

The nice thing about being a writer, as opposed to an actor or anybody who has to go outside, is that no one cares what writers look like. Social inadequates all, they live in a cave called The No-Fun Zone and people cross the street to avoid them.

There is one way to look younger without repeatedly turning your face into an oozing pincushion and bruising to the point of rot for three solid months. It’s called “butterbody.” Eat as much delicious life-enhancing food as you like and float on a heavenly cloud.

Lena Dunham looks wonderful in a green bikini on Girls.

Plumpitude is pretty. When you wisely eat salmon sashimi for dinner with a chaser of organic wine followed by the best cake in the world, Dufflet’s Lemon Coconut Layer Cake, you may gain a little weight. Good for you! Have another dollop of delicious rose-pink raw fish, slurp another beaker, serve up a second slice.

Your face will fill out and display your delight, tear troughs gone from your face, “Venus lines” from your neck (the brochure for Selphyl—self-fill, geddit?—refers to these mysterious things).

And then you will bump into old coal-miner Murray, as the cheerful journalist Hadley Freeman did at an after-party.

“Dazed from the fumes, I walked smack into an older gentleman only to realize it was, in fact, Bill Murray.

“Oh! Mr. Murray – I’m sorry. I’m Hadley from the Guardian and—“I stammered pathetically.

“Oh, there, there. Nobody’s perfect,” he said, giving me a bear hug for a good (very good) 30 seconds.

Wrinkled movie stars still get hugs, although you’d be afraid to hug Novak—or the unrecognizable Billy Crystal and Goldie Hawn—lest you shift something and it snaps. It may just be because they’re rich, and Americans will always want to be enfolded by people with money.

But people who haven’t hauled up their faces and snipped off the loose skin at least approximate the norm. Just bathe, is all we ask. Oh, and stay away from Normcore, the clothing that makes you just another unrecognizable digit in the billions who fill this planet.

Don’t you look nice now. Happy International Women’s Day, one and all.