![]() ![]() In recent years, the message has come more in the form of an enthusiastic but ultimately empty hug. God forbid your husband appear younger than you do. Throughout much of the 20th century, it was delivered with a hammer, a warning - always to women - that the man in your life won’t love you as you age. The tone of the message around aging from advertisers has shifted over the years. Feel weird about getting older? You are not alone. And still, they’re encouraged to spend thousands of dollars to try to win. The minute women hit their 20s (and in some cases, even younger), they’re told they’re in a race against time they’re destined to lose. Marketers know some consumers will spend a lot of money hoping they’ll do anything, and they’ll do so for years. But even for the products that actually make a difference, whether it be a sunscreen to try to slow skin damage or retinol to try to reduce some wrinkles, there’s really a limited amount they can accomplish. Many companies fail to back up their claims of reversing the forward march of time, and some products wind up irritating the skin and making it more vulnerable to the elements, not less. “Youth is the ultimate goal, and obviously very convenient for the industry, because it’s an impossible goal.”ĭermatologists say that a lot of this stuff is a scam anyway and doesn’t work. “Anti-aging is probably the most popular and lasting promise of any sort of skin care brand or injectable,” said Jessica DeFino, a beauty writer and author of The Unpublishable, a newsletter focused on the darker sides of the beauty industry. The global anti-aging market went from $25 billion to nearly $37 billion during the same period. According to data from Euromonitor International, the anti-aging market grew from $3.9 billion in 2016 to $4.9 billion in 2021 in the United States alone. This fuels a multibillion-dollar cosmetic and skin care industry dedicated to helping people - mainly women - stay young, or rather, try to look like it. ![]() We celebrate older women but not the un-intervened-upon face. We’ve learned to pretend to celebrate older women, but we haven’t learned to accept what happens naturally to their skin. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. I left thinking it’s probably time to start looking into fillers.īy submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. All of the panelists acknowledged at least the temptation to get some work done, and the conundrum that you’re “shamed if you do, shamed if you don’t,” as Porizkova put it. Christie Brinkley mentioned a specific wrinkle that bothers her multiple times and the steps she’s taken to minimize it. But some mild discomfort with the premise was evident. ![]() The takeaway of the panel, hosted by the Aspen Institute, was supposed to be that women should demand to be seen, regardless of how old they are, and that society needs to accept all versions of beauty, no matter someone’s birth date. “How are you going to be anti-living?” she asked. The discussion’s moderator, Allure editor-in-chief Jessica Cruel, brought up the magazine’s much-publicized decision five years ago to axe the term “anti-aging” from its pages. Model Yasmin Warsame spoke about how aging is treated as a sign of wisdom in her birth country of Somalia. “We need representation of spring, summer, fall, and winter,” one of the panelists, Swedish model Paulina Porizkova, declared. In late June, I sat in on a conversation featuring three models, all over the age of 50, about aging and beauty. ![]()
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