Paulina Porizkova, now 61, says going from “the hottest girl in town” to “an invisible 58-year-old” shocked her. In a PEOPLE interview published October 17, 2026, the model recalled that after her divorce from Ric Ocasek she expected dating to be easy, then found herself asking, “Wait, but with who?”
“So going from being the hottest girl in town to being an invisible 58-year-old was really shocking,” she said.
Porizkova says she got about 4 matches in 5 years on the dating app Raya. “Older women are f—ng invisible on Raya,” she said. She says she began feeling overlooked at parties and bars around age 58, too.
“I know people don’t believe me. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re Paulina Porizkova, how is that possible?’ Well, you should just shadow me at a party and see how guys my age will just walk away and follow the 30-year-old to buy her a drink instead.”
A 2018 Science Advances study of nearly 200,000 heterosexual online daters found that women’s desirability, as measured in that dating population, peaked at 18 and declined thereafter, while men’s peaked around 50. Those findings describe patterns on dating sites, not anyone’s worth or prospects for a relationship.
Porizkova had spent decades being recognized for her looks. Harper’s Bazaar named her one of America’s 10 most beautiful women, and her 1988 Estée Lauder contract paid $6 million a year, then the world’s biggest modeling contract. Even at 21, with Sports Illustrated covers, her Estée Lauder deal and numerous other magazine covers, she says comparisons with other models left her more insecure than ever.
On her 36th birthday, she noticed a change: “I looked in the mirror and realized my face no longer looked young.” She later described the advantage she’d grown used to: “When you have used your beauty to get around, it’s like having extra cash in your back pocket.”
“I was so used to walking down the street and having the young guys passing by at least give me a flicker of a look. But once you’re over 40, you become invisible. You’re a brick in the building, and it’s sad.”
At 52, she described how the compliments had changed: “At 52 and unaltered, people tell me I look good for my age. This is not the same as being told you’re beautiful.” At 56, she said, “I am as invisible as any other 56-year-old woman walking into a party.”
She likened the gradual shift to being “like the boiled frog: you don’t know until you’re gone.” As her marriage was ending, she felt unseen at home as well as elsewhere. “Nothing ages as poorly as a beautiful woman’s ego,” she has said.
In her writing, she’s also questioned the security she once thought beauty offered: “Beauty can get a woman what she wants: love and money. But when beauty leaves you, so can the things it brought.”
She described its limits another way: “Beauty, unlike the rest of the gifts handed out at birth, does not require dedication, patience and hard work to pay off. But it’s also the only gift that does not keep on giving.”
Porizkova separates being beautiful from being noticed: “Prettiness is simple: it is youth and symmetry… Older women often become invisible because they’re no longer considered attractive. We might be (in fact, I’d argue, we are) beautiful. But beauty and visibility are not necessarily linked.”
She also values what aging has brought her: “I am way smarter. I have more patience. I’m more intellectually curious. I’m more generous. Everything about me is better. But I have wrinkles and that does not make me ugly.”
“We get more beautiful with age. We have earned our beauty… There is no such thing as ugly and old. Only shortsighted and ignorant,” she has said.
That view carries into her work as an Estée Lauder global ambassador: she rejects “anti-aging” messaging and won’t promote youth as preferable to age.
She met TV comedy writer Jeff Greenstein, 62, on Raya, where he’d set his age range at 52 to 60. “I wasn’t ruling out the idea of meeting a contemporary,” he said.
Their conversations moved from marathon phone calls to tea on FaceTime, then wine, then tequila. They married in Italy this July.