Body Confidence and Age: What 25 Countries Revealed (and Why France Was the Exception)
What a survey of more than twenty-two thousand adults across twenty-five countries found about how people feel about their bodies as they get older, why France was the one European country where it ran the other way, and what that pattern means for you, standing at your own wardrobe today.
By Magda Kazoli, Certified Image Consultant | Creator of the Visual Voice® System
You'd probably assume the woman who feels least at ease in her own body is the one in her fifties, reading up on collagen, rather than the twenty-five-year-old filtering her face before she posts a Story. A survey of more than twenty-two thousand adults across twenty-five countries suggests it's very often the other way round.
The findings came out in 2015, when the polling firm YouGov asked adults in twenty-five countries how they felt about their bodies. In the United States, Australia and most of the European and Asia Pacific countries it covered, people aged fifty-five and over were more likely than people in their twenties and thirties to say they were happy with their bodies, which is the opposite of the story Western media had been telling for decades.
YouGov named four countries where it ran the other way, with younger people more satisfied with their looks than older people: Egypt, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and, the only one in Europe, France.
I've been watching that pattern play out for more than six years now, with clients in eighteen countries, many of whom arrive convinced that their fifties are the beginning of an ending.
This piece is about the places where midlife arrives with a peace nobody told you about, the handful where it doesn't, and what all of it means for you when you open your wardrobe on a Tuesday morning in Athens, London or Milan.
What the 2015 YouGov Survey Found About Body Image and Age
YouGov's design was simple and unusually broad. 22,140 adults answered online between 28 April and 13 May 2015, and the results were weighted to represent the online adult population, aged eighteen and over, in each country (Source: YouGov, 2015, Multi-country study finds body image improves with age, 22 July 2015).
The list ran across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Egypt, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia.
In the United States, 55 per cent of Millennials, aged eighteen to thirty-four at the time, said they were comfortable with their own bodies, and among Americans aged fifty-five and over that figure rose to 61 per cent. It's worth being clear that YouGov asked men and women together, so these are figures for adults rather than for women alone, and in the United States women were less happy with their looks than men, 52 per cent against 63. Even so, the people you'd expect to be the most anxious about their appearance were the ones telling the pollsters they were the most at peace with it.
The women crying in wardrobe consultations weren't the sixty-year-olds. They were the twenty-eight-year-olds who thought they still had time to fix what didn't need fixing. That's the number the industry never quotes, because the industry sells a story that requires the opposite.
Why Going Back to Your Twenties Wouldn't Bring the Peace You Remember
If you've ever caught yourself thinking, in the mirror or at a difficult work event, that if only you still looked the way you did at twenty-eight you'd feel differently in your own skin, the research has something uncomfortable to hand you, which is that you very probably didn't feel any differently at twenty-eight either.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because it's the sentence I've been trying to hand to clients for years.
The woman at twenty-eight had smoother skin, a narrower waist and a social life she's now nostalgic for, and she was also, as the numbers suggest, less at peace with how she looked than the woman she's now trying to become again. The photographs from that summer, the ones she keeps going back to on her phone, were taken of a woman who didn't know she was beautiful. Nostalgia is real, but the premise underneath it isn't.
Every version of yourself you keep trying to return to was carrying a version of the same unease you're trying to escape, which means you've been chasing the peace of someone who never had it.
That's the first thing YouGov's numbers tell a woman in midlife. The second is that, in most of the countries surveyed, people walk into that peace anyway as the years go on, without earning it, without fighting for it, and without having to look thirty to have it.
What Body Image Research Says About Women and Age
The 2015 findings didn't appear out of nowhere. They landed on top of years of academic research pointing the same way, and that research explains the mechanism underneath.
The Australian psychologist Marika Tiggemann has spent much of her career following body image across the adult lifespan. In a 2004 review she set out what the research had found so far: women's bodies do change with age and some measures of dissatisfaction stay stable, but the importance of appearance to a woman's sense of herself keeps easing as she gets older (Source: Tiggemann, M., 2004, Body image across the adult life span: Stability and change, Body Image, 1(1), pp. 29 to 41).
In plain words, the weight a woman gives to how she looks, in her overall picture of herself, eases as the years go on, and something else moves in to take up the space, whether that's her work, the people who matter to her, or what her body can do in a day.
A year earlier, Webster and Tiggemann had put numbers on that shift. In a cross-sectional study of women aged twenty to sixty-five, they found that as the years mounted, body dissatisfaction became less predictive of low self-esteem, so an older woman could feel the same discomfort about her figure as a younger woman and it would do less damage to how she felt about herself overall (Source: Webster, J., & Tiggemann, M., 2003, The relationship between women's body satisfaction and self-image across the life span: The role of cognitive control, Journal of Genetic Psychology, 164(2), pp. 241 to 252).
A more recent study, published in 2024 by Louise Hanson and colleagues, looked at 1,186 women aged eighteen to eighty in the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia, Nigeria and China. In every country and every age group, the women who had taken the thin or athletic ideal more to heart, and who felt more pressure to look a particular way, appreciated their bodies less, and older women in every culture reported feeling less of that pressure than younger women did (Source: Hanson, L. N., et al., 2024, Examining body appreciation in six countries: The impact of age and sociocultural pressure, PLOS ONE, 19(7), e0306913).
Taken together, the studies point the same way. In most cultures, as a woman moves through her forties and fifties, the pressure about how she looks quietens and the importance she gives it eases. The mirror still has opinions, but those opinions matter less, because the self she's building has more rooms in it than the one that lived in her twenties, and appearance is no longer the whole front hall.
The younger American wasn't less comfortable than the woman over fifty because her figure was worse. She was less comfortable because her figure was the loudest thing in the room.
Why France Was the Exception in Europe
The same explanation very likely covers both groups of countries. Where people grow into a calmer relationship with their bodies, the cultural pressure to look young fades as they age, and where the pattern broke, that pressure seems never to fade, staying as loud at fifty as it was at twenty-five, so the exhale other women get to take simply never arrives.
In France, 68 per cent of eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds told YouGov they were happy with their looks, and among French adults aged fifty-five and over, only 55 per cent said the same. YouGov called France the only European country in the survey where young people were more confident of their looks than the middle-aged and older.
I have sat in Parisian consulting rooms with women in their fifties who were more frightened of ageing than any client I have ever worked with elsewhere, and I have never quite been able to shake the feeling that the room itself was in on it. French women themselves have been telling journalists for years that the pressure to look effortlessly youthful in France is neither gentle nor optional.
In a Marie Claire investigation, one Parisian actress described the atmosphere as making her feel like she needed a facelift every three weeks. In a Refinery29 piece, a photographer put it more plainly: the sublimated female form sells everything in France, and it is never allowed to age or grow out. A book based on interviews with women in Paris and beyond described a stigma against women over the age of forty that most observers outside the country do not fully appreciate exists.
Egypt, Mexico and the UAE each carry their own version of the same weight, tied to different histories and different beauty industries. The pattern underneath is the one Tiggemann and the researchers who followed her have been describing for twenty years: when a culture won't let a woman's appearance stop mattering, she doesn't get to move on from it either.
The uncomfortable question is which side of that line you're living on. You might live in one of the countries where the pattern holds, but if your feeds are French, your magazines are French and your idea of style was formed in Paris in the 1990s, your wardrobe might be dressing you the way France dresses its women, because this pattern travels further than a passport.
What This Means When You Open Your Wardrobe Tomorrow
The ease that arrives for so many people in their fifties isn't something you have to earn or fight for. In most of the countries YouGov surveyed it came with the years, not automatically for everyone, but often enough to appear clearly in a sample of more than twenty-two thousand.
The exception, and it's the exception that matters, is when you're still living inside a story that says the version of yourself you should have kept was the one you were at twenty-eight. That story can be a cultural one, the kind a French woman takes in by walking down her own street. It can be a personal one, the kind you inherit from a mother who taught you never to be photographed past a certain age, and I've written about the quiet signs that you're still dressing to your mother's rules. And it can live in the wardrobe itself, when the clothes on your rail are all still hoping you'll one day look like the person you used to be.
The settling comes when the story about how you look stops running quite so loud, and when the clothes on your hangers are dressing the woman you are now. Trying harder to earn it usually gets in the way, and the last part, the clothes, is the piece you have some control over.
Think about the colours on your rail, the shapes you reach for on the mornings that matter, and the fit you've made peace with rather than the fit you keep waiting to grow back into. These small daily choices either turn the story down or keep it running. A wardrobe built for your current chapter won't do all the work by itself, but a wardrobe still built for the woman you were fifteen years ago will make the arrival much harder.
Across twenty-five countries, the evidence has been saying for over a decade that body confidence tends to grow with age, and what gets in the way is almost always a story handed down and hung on hangers you chose while you were still inside it. The question you get to answer on Tuesday morning is whether the clothes you open are helping you walk in that direction or holding you back from it.
Your Next Step: Closet Confidence
If something in this piece has named a feeling you've been carrying, the sense that your wardrobe is still dressing a woman you were years ago, you don't have to wait for a new season or a birthday you've been dreading to do something about it.
Closet Confidence is my four-week self-study course, built on the first principles of the Visual Voice® System, for the woman whose clothes are still telling the story of somebody she used to be. It works with the wardrobe you have now and the chapter you're in now, so the clothes you open in the morning start dressing the woman you've become rather than the one you keep trying to get back to.
The course is open now, and you can start today.
The research has been pointing the same way for years, and your wardrobe can catch up with it.
About the Author
Magda Kazoli has spent twenty years in communication and six as a certified Image Consultant, working with women across 18 countries on their wardrobe and on the presence they carry into every room.
She created the Visual Voice® System for the woman who senses that something has shifted. A new chapter. A career change. A quiet feeling that the woman in the mirror doesn't quite match the woman she's become. The wardrobe is full. Nothing feels right. That's the gap Magda works on.
Over 900 women across the UK, the US, and Europe have gone through her Closet Confidence programme. They come out with a clear visual identity, a wardrobe they can actually use, and the confidence to get dressed without second-guessing themselves.
Based in Athens, working internationally. Certified by House of Colour UK. Accredited member of FIPI, the Federation of Image Professionals International.
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