A Beauty Through The Ages

Maye Musk tells zaneta cheng why it’s never too late to have it all

- Zaneta Cheng

MAYE MUSK TURNS 70 this April. This may not seem significant — after all, she’s not the first woman to hit 7-0. But for Musk, this milestone is worth extra attention because last year, at 69 years evergreen, she was made a face of CoverGirl — the oldest in the cosmetics brand’s history.

Musk has been in front of the camera since she was 15, but her modelling career really kicked off around 10 years ago as she approached her sixties, when she stopped colouring her hair and chopped it short. “As a teenager, I had mousy brown hair and I started colouring it blonde,” Musk says. “Suddenly I was a blonde model and to keep it going I had to do my roots every four weeks. Then, when I was coming to my sixties I decided: I’m tired of colouring my hair — and, you know, I was still mainly a dietician more than a model — so I’m going to grow my hair out. But my best friend Julie told me to chop it all off, so I did.”

“My then-model agency said to me, ‘You’ll never model again.’ And for six months they wouldn’t send me out. I went up there and sat in their office and said, ‘You will let me out of my contract’, but they refused and said I had another three years. So I went to their boss, who let me out, and I just went to a different, smaller agency and the next thing you know, in a few months, I had billboards in Times Square and Madison Square Garden. I had editorial work, for which I hadn’t been considered so long and suddenly I became this edgy white haired model. Who knew?”