1-Minute Musing: Anti-Aging Works!
A quick, couple-paragraph thought.
A dermatologist I follow on Instagram recently posted a video with the caption, “How not to look old: tips to prevent or reverse what we all dread!”
Oh boy.
This is not medical care. This is the medicalization of beauty culture (you know, diet culture’s face-focused counterpart). Looking old is not a health issue. Dreading looking old, on the other hand, very much is. Besides the obvious concerns — from the potential physical harm of “anti-aging” products and procedures; to the potential psychological harm of the anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and obsessive thoughts that often stem from beauty culture — one study out of Yale University shows that a negative outlook on aging could cut seven and a half years off your life. (In that sense, I guess the beauty industry’s anti-aging messaging really does work!)
Trick question! The answer is (probably) all of the above.
Anyway, I don’t have much else to say here that I haven’t said before:
Anti-aging is the industry’s most enduring, most engrained, most dehumanizing beauty standard.
Abolishing beauty culture will require a dermatological reckoning.
We don’t get to live without looking like it — and we don’t get to fully live if we “dread” looking like it, either.
And smile lines! Why are they a bad thing? Mine go all the way across my cheeks and I fucking love it. After the traumas of my 20s, to have SMILE LINES on my face is an incredible testiment to (my privilege, and) the happiness I have managed to cultivate in the decades after. Wrinkles tell stories, y’all.
(I don’t love the way lipstick runs up my lip creases, so I wear nude shades now. Cannot imagine using fillers but I am no longer judgey of women who do!!)
I keep reading about women of a certain age thinking they are now ,,invisible” and it breaks my heart. It is such a giant misconception. Maybe they - or rather, ‘we’: I just turned 50 - are ,,invisible” to horny men, but not to any other woman who enjoys looking around for female grace, fun, style, grit, anything REAL, of ANY age. You are seen!! And if not: speak up!