I hate terms like ‘body acceptance’ and ‘positive self image’. They wrap up the immense complexity of a person’s ever-changing feelings about themselves in faux-feminist psychobabble buzzwords and using them makes me feel like an advert for something expensive that doesn’t really work. Expressions like ‘anti-aging’ or even ‘pro-age’ (sorry Dove, but your self-esteem-boosting product range names just don’t do it for me) are even worse. Age isn’t a thing to fight or to run towards. It’s just something that happens, an incidental, the passage of time that goes on in the background while we live our lives and do stuff.
When I was doing my A Levels at college, one of my friends who was the same age as me used to panic about her wrinkles. She didn’t have any that I could see, but then she was 17 so why would she have wrinkles? She spent a fortune on anti-aging creams and worried about the effect that smiling and laughing would have. I last saw her when she was 26 and she was still fighting those invisible wrinkles and was still buying anti-aging creams. She still had no lines on her face that I could see.
Anyone who reads my blog regularly will know that I don’t always have the most realistic or healthy attitude towards my own appearance, so I’m not going to start telling anyone else how they should feel about their body or face. But the anti-aging thing…I just don’t GET it. I’m 27. I’m cool with being 27. I’m pretty sure I’ll be cool with being 30 or 40 or whatever. I don’t see any wrinkles on my face. No doubt I will one day. Those wrinkles will be a tribute to a life of emotion and expression, reflections of years of laughing and smiling (and crying and shouting, cause no-one smiles all the time).
Maybe when I’m older I’ll think differently, and I’ll switch my skin clearing moisturiser (thank you Clinique) for something with ’smoothing’ in the title. One of my friends, a very beautiful lady of (I can’t believe you’re actually) 30 (!) recently said “I’ll start worrying about wrinkles when I get rid of these teenage spots!”. It made me laugh. And it drove home the complete insanity of all these anti-aging adverts targeted at women our age and younger. Even worse are the ones that tout their products as not an alternative to plastic surgery, but something to use before plastic surgery is necessary. Umm…what? When did that become a when and not an if? Is plastic surgery something we ALL must have now? Do we reach ‘a certain age’ and voluntarily get anesthetised so that someone can cut away sections of our faces and tie our scalps in knots behind our ears to stretch our features into something less revealing of our age?
Are we all supposed to be ashamed of having LIVED? Or at least looking like we’ve lived? Maybe I’m crazy, but I rather like the fact that I’ve packed a lot in to my 27 years and plan to pack a lot more into the next 27 and the 27 after that. One of the most attractive things in a person (to me, anyway) is that look in their eyes that says “I’ve been places, I know things”. If the rest of their face tells the same story, then excellent, beautiful. Rock on with your delicious, intriguing, experienced selves.
If you want proof of how fucking INSANE the whole anti-aging (marketing) culture is, look out for ads for L’Oreal’s MenExpert range on tv, specifically the one that says “You think you look the business, she thinks you look over-worked”. Seriously, what? There’s a lesson for you guys – work hard, be a success, but don’t you DARE look it or your girlfriend will dump you for a younger model. How the tables have turned in advertising-land! But this isn’t a rant about gender roles and hypocrisy. It’s just that we’re all so accustomed to seeing these adverts targeted at women, that when we see them targeted at men the madness shines through even more brightly.
By all means, take care of yourself. Look after your skin, your face, your body and your mind. But do it because you want to look good and be healthy, because you want to smile at the face looking back at you in the mirror, not because you want to look ten years younger (or 8 years younger, as Rimmel claims to have made Kate Moss look with their recent foundation which is primarily marketed at teenagers). And whatever you do, please take a moment to reconsider that Botox…cause if you get that cow poison (yep, Botox is short for Bovine Toxin) into your face, you won’t be able to smile at anything and that would suck. Give me a few lines on an expressive face over a chemically-smoothed mask any day.
And if you’re in your 20s and buying anti-aging products…it really is time to grow up.
Great post. I don’t get it. Worrying about wrinkles at 17?
I have the biggest discussions about this with my mom. She’s 42 and looks 42, and looks beautiful in my opinion. But she says she’s an old woman now, and hates her wrinkles.
Though she says she hasn’t lived enough to be 42. She went from their parents home to get married and then to have kids. Doesn’t like her job. So maybe it’s not the older look itself. Maybe it’s seeing they’re aging and running out of time while feeling they haven’t acomplished anything at all.