What should a person my age look like?
April 1, 2024 12:52 p.m.(Has been updated 12:53pm)
Today, when women try to age naturally, it’s like standing on a small stone in a sea of lava. That lava is social pressure, a relentless barrage of posts on social media, and not knowing what someone your age or even a decade or more older actually looks like. is.
Now that I’m 43 years old, I feel that this pressure is only increasing every year. From the videos of plastic surgeons on TikTok that tell me that skin care is a waste of money because it’s better to tweak it, to the beauty industry’s rhetoric that makes aging seem like an epidemic or disease. Even the wording. Age correction, anti-aging, wrinkle correction, wrinkle reduction. All of this is designed to make aging seem like a problem that needs to be solved, rather than a completely natural stage in the cycle of birth and death.
I curate my feed to see more positive messages about aging, especially women aging naturally, but it still feels inevitable.
Then I received a press release with the subject line, “Is it time for preventive Botox treatment?”
The spokesperson was pitching to a client who was a plastic surgeon offering “preventive” Botox as a service. I’ve received a lot of PR emails, but this one made me feel terrible. That edgy personalization instantly lifted me out of the routine and put me in a spiral tunnel of worrying about my appearance. It felt especially insidious because it played out the aging horror stories that are embedded in all of us.
In addition to this, the potential negative effects of preventive Botox are also coming under increasing scrutiny. Overuse over a long period of time can cause your skin to look thinner, especially as your muscles weaken.It can also cause unnecessary problems – says one dermatologist trend Freezing parts of your face means other muscles may overcompensate, causing wrinkles to appear prematurely.
This is not intended to make people who undergo Botox for cosmetic reasons feel bad. More and more people in my own social circle are using or considering Botox treatment, and the amount of Botox used is only going to increase. A 2022 audit by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons found demand had increased by 124% compared to the previous year.
Rather, if you want Botox, while there is a majority for whom it is perfectly acceptable to do so, if you don’t want Botox or are choosing to age naturally, you should promote Botox. It means that we are fighting against an overwhelming narrative. Youth as the holy grail.
Just as people choose Botox for their own reasons, the reason I age naturally is because the thought of my face not looking like my own is scarier than the idea of getting wrinkles. When I contracted Long Corona, I couldn’t smell my body for about 8 months. Nothing could have prepared me for the feeling of disconnection, the sadness I felt when I lost a very fundamental and important connection to my body through one of my senses.
No amount of facial manipulation can turn back time or even return you to your younger self. Because that time has already passed. But it makes me look like a past version, erasing any version of the real me that might exist in that present. Because another year passes and I keep trying to get back to where I was instead of living in the moment.
I’ve been trying to understand why people get Botox when there’s no medical reason for it, like migraines or sagging eyelid skin. The most common answer I receive is, “Because it makes me feel better.” It seems inevitable that he will come back to one thing. That is, we believe that youth is better and good, and that aging is bad and undesirable. I want to make someone feel safe and supported in their choice to receive Botox, but I also have concerns. That’s because people who undergo Botox treatment to prevent signs of aging have to be locked into the process for the rest of their lives.
It’s amazing how your face changes along the natural timeline of aging, and how parts of your face can remain frozen for years and wonder what you’ll look like when it stops. It’s quite another thing to face something.
This begs the question, what is the anti-aging industry actually selling? Youth is neither a value nor an ethic, nor is it something that can even be achieved beyond the point that it has passed. I mean, you can’t really buy it.
Beauty writer and critic Jessica Defino does an excellent job of summarizing anti-aging beauty standards at Substack. unpublishable: “The history of this standard goes back centuries. It stems from systems of oppression. Certainly patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Anti-aging is the ultimate goal of capitalism, but it never It’s unattainable, right? Anti-aging is physically impossible. And striving for anti-aging means being a lifelong consumer.”
This only strengthens my resolve to eliminate the negative ideas and prejudices we have about aging. Having a choice and feeling like you have to choose that choice are two different things. After 40 years of never feeling pressured to look a certain way or feeling like I fit a standard, I decided enough was enough.
