Imagine the host of products and services that are available to look more young and attractive…… day creams, night creams, neck creams, hand creams, exfoliators, spray tans, mascaras, anti-age serums, cellulite creams, face masks, concealers, shaving creams, beard trimmers, foundations, lipsticks, home waxing kits, recovery oils, pore correctors, eyeliners, botox, manicures, pedicures, mud baths, sweated wraps, and full-blown plastic surgery. A whole lot of beauty blogs and makeup bloggers are there to bombard us with diet books, gym memberships and dream abs, workouts, action hero-workouts, face-yoga videos, digital apps, and filters to enhance what these products can’t.
Self-obsessed monomaniacs… women, and increasingly men… aren’t satisfied with how they look. With an increased ability to look better than ever before, people seem to have set much higher standards of what they want to look like. The images on TV and cinema screens, billboards, and social media tend to show everyone, presenting their best, most filtered selves to show the world. As people grow neurotic about appearances, looks are marketed as the problems that can be fixed by spending money on cosmetics, fitness magazines, the right food, gym membership, whatever. Looking conventionally attractive, however, doesn’t make people stop worrying about their looks. Very good-looking people–models, for instance–are more worried about their looks than people who don’t walk down catwalks for a living.
Feathery toilets of males in the animal kingdom get up to their vain conceits, by the action of strutting and gambling, whistling and prancing, whirling and wheeling up and down before the plain and humble females as much to say ‘look at me! Am I not a grand and gorgeous creature?’ Fresh and youthful faces attract the gaze; visual dwell time on these faces is longer. People are pre-programmed to assess the age and beauty of others. As children and teenagers, they feel young because they believe they look young too. They’ve smooth, homogeneous skin and thick, pigmented hair. The smooth, shining, unwrinkled face of the adult is often accompanied by relatively infantile characteristics. The competitiveness of modern society gives an advantage to younger people blessed with speed, endurance, strength, agility, and quick reflexes.
As if to win and be able to live like the citizens of Aldous Huxley’s World State, with a dystopian vision, to perpetually look thirty years old, even as inner organs begin to rot, people resent age and pretend that they weren’t going to die. Once they reach their twenties and thirties, people may still class themselves as ‘ young’ because they remain smooth and richly coiffed, even if they themselves are now more burdened by the pressures of life. They hear the phrase, anti-aging, but don’t conjure up an image of new treatments for arthritis, dementia, or hearing loss; they think about their skin. Once crossing forties, they start to notice changes in their appearance which they’ve always instinctively associated with (horrors) their parents.
Their perceptions of ‘who-they’re’ change in view of the creeping changes in their appearances. The superficial aspects to some extent go hang, both figuratively and literally. Within an alarmingly few years, the skin becomes less beautiful. Muscle mass decreases. Bone density gradually declines. Posture alters, foot arches sag, spine bows, and the discs between vertebrae are compressed. Changes in the spine, rather than shortening of the limb bones, lead to men getting shorter. This accentuates the middle-aged fat-with-spindly-legs appearance leading to the deterioration of their body image. As the potential for producing children gradually declines, biology loses interest in appearances.
People don’t like their skin or hair to age. Wrinkles, grey hair, and reduced lip size are perceived as that of the elderly……bored, close-minded, dependent, isolated, narrow-minded, neglected, old-fashioned, passive, poor, sedentary, sick, unaltered, unproductive, morbidly afraid of death, living the worst years of life— spending a good deal of their time sleeping, sitting, doing nothing, or nostalgically dwelling upon their past. A baby’s dependence is acceptable because it’s never been independent. People struggle against the dependence of the elderly who have been independent for decades and can’t avoid growing dependent on others and giving up their long-cherished privacy.
A full head of hair is symbolic of male strength and power. Herein lies its attraction. Baldies attempt to conceal baldness. In the 21st-century, quack medicines are still on sale. Billions are spent on elixirs and compounds that claim to make the hairs on the bald patches grow and flourish once more. People betray themselves into dyeing their greys without realizing that it tells people, you’re not twenty years younger than you’re. God in His kindness and wisdom causes the hair to keep pace with the declining freshness of the face. An aged face, wrinkled and pallid or one that has lost youthfulness and become fat and coarse, are both softened and refined by grey or white hair. Hands, neck, children’s age, and the things you talk about, the words you use, and above all age is much more pervasive than just looks.
Aging is something we can’t do much about. We can eat healthily, exercise, and live sensibly but we’ll still age. Our 80th birthday will still be on the same date. Sure we can make it more likely we’ll reach 80 but we can’t stop the wheels of time. When there is nothing we can do about something the point of worry begins to diminish. People die whether or not they eat six almonds a day. Tons of anti-aging creams are there but people still grow old. Thanks to the billion-dollar marketing campaign aimed at making people ashamed of wrinkles and lines and ageing, the pursuit of looking young accentuates the fear of growing old. If we embrace our wrinkles, embrace growing old and other people’s wrinkles, maybe marketers would have less fear to work with and magnify.
Remember, oldies/wrinklies are the repositories that transmit information and experience. Under hunter-gatherer conditions, the knowledge possessed by even one person over the age of 70 could spell the difference between survival and starvation for a whole clan. Our long lifespan, therefore, was important for our rise from animal to human status. Wrinkles are honorable, provided they’re in the right place. Don’t fight it. Accept it as the complex elegance of a melting candle.