In The Endless Pursuit of Youth, Are We Losing More Than Just Our Wrinkles?
We’ve never had more ways to hold back the visible signs of ageing. But as the definition of what’s normal shifts, what happens to those who choose not to keep up?
In case you’ve not had the pleasure: a VISIA machine is a facial imaging and skin analysis used by aesthetic clinics and skincare brands to give you a digital reading of your skin. You sit in front of a monitor and a camera takes terrifyingly close-up, bare-faced images of you, mapping things like wrinkles and sun damage. But it also offers another, more insidious metric: it compares your results against a massive global database, ranking your appearance relative to others of the same age, gender and skin type. A score of 80% means you have fewer wrinkles, spots and visible pores than 80% of the others in your group.
Of course, this is the bit everyone really wants to know. Not just ‘how does my skin look?’, but: how does it look for my age? How do I compare with thousands of other people the same age as me? Am I ageing better? Am I looking younger? And am I therefore, somehow, winning at life?
Judging by appearances, ageing well, and attempting to beat the odds of ageing is a game many of us are winning. For the past few decades, since the ‘tweakment’ revolution, the bar for what your chronological age ‘looks like’ has been moving ever higher. Earlier this year, there was a viral trend pointing out the difference in appearance of Blanche Devereaux, the 53-year-old character in US sitcom The Golden Girls (played by actress Rue McClanahan, who was 51 when season 1 was filmed in 1985), and celebrities in their fifties now, including Gwyneth Paltrow (54) and Jennifer Lopez (57). The Golden Girls looked like glamorous grannies. Gwyneth and J-Lo look more like their granddaughters.
In August, Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock appeared on the red carpet for Practical Magic 2, looking only marginally different from how they did in the original 1998 movie. Come September, it was 56-year-old Rachel Weisz’s turn, looking radiant as she was photographed filming a sequel to The Mummy, 27 years after the original.
Of course, all these women do look older. Whatever you do to preserve your youth from your thirties onwards, there’s no getting away from the decline in collagen or the difference in natural glow. But among many of these Hollywood actresses, there’s a striking, almost shocking absence of any of the traditional markers of ageing: the lines and wrinkles, the drooping eyelids, the sagging jawline. Now, foreheads are creaseless. Jawlines are taut. Complexions radiate such natural-looking luminosity that it’s impossible to tell whether it’s achieved by good makeup or good genes. The fact is, there’s so much you can do to protect against ageing now that each successive decade has undergone a radical reinvention, reframing our definition of what someone in their thirties, forties or fifties looks like.
When I started out as a beauty editor 25 years ago, the accepted wisdom from the skincare companies was that you’d start to see fine lines and wrinkles from your thirties. Loss of volume really started with perimenopause, in your forties, and deep wrinkles—the sort you can’t treat with creams alone—started to form in your fifties. Now, there’s a 20-year shift in the baseline. The lines and wrinkles don’t necessarily appear until your late 40s or 50s. You can be in your 60s now and still have plumped, glowing skin.
So how has this ‘baseline creep’ happened? When did 60 become the new 30? When did neanimorphic (the technical term for looking significantly younger than one’s chronological age) become so commonplace? It’s mostly the result of aesthetic treatments, yes, which will arguably make the fastest and most radical difference to your appearance. But alongside the tweakments, the wholesale adoption of daily SPF by skincare enthusiasts has definitely helped, as has the increased availability of over-the-counter Retinoids—topical vitamin A ingredients which are still acknowledged by dermatologists as the ‘gold standard’ for anti-ageing.
Starting early is also helping. Jennifer Lawrence recently said she has started her “Retinol journey” in earnest, and Hailey Bieber has discussed her interest in longevity science and the use of NAD+ treatments, saying during an episode of The Kardashians, “I’m going to NAD for the rest of my life, and I’m never going to age.” Last year, aged 42, the comedian Katherine Ryan had a full facelift, explaining that after multiple pregnancies, she felt her face had changed and it was “dissociative,” saying she just wanted to look the way she did pre-pregnancy.
Is it now the case that simply by doing nothing, you look far older than your contemporary counterparts?
One of the striking things about the new pursuit of decade-defying youth is the enthusiasm with which so many of these women now embrace it. Notable exceptions notwithstanding—such as Kate Winslet and Jamie Lee Curtis, who combat the tyranny of the anti-ageing lobby and present themselves without Botox and fillers and sometimes even without makeup—one of the biggest shifts in our post-tweakment culture is how much so many of us seem to be enjoying the journey. Perhaps it’s because of how much difference you can really make now—with impressive, clinically-proven products and natural-looking aesthetic procedures, it doesn’t feel, as it perhaps once did, that you are fighting a losing battle. Maybe it’s because of the way skincare has merged with self-care, so that elaborate and expensive treatments and routines feel indulgent rather than effortful. Maybe it’s because beauty has become a playground now, with stores like Space NK and Sephora transforming the act of beauty shopping, hitherto both an onslaught for the senses and an exercise in self-doubt, into more positive and even affirming experiences.
But even so: what if you’re someone who doesn’t want to put the work in? What if you don’t see the need, or you don’t have the time, or the income? Are there now two faces of each decade, the ‘old’ one, with the burgeoning signs of ageing you’d hitherto have expected as part and parcel of living your life—and the ‘new’ one, throwing the kitchen sink at ageing and looking far more youthful as a result? Is it now the case that simply by doing nothing, you look far older than your contemporary counterparts?
It seems to me that probably, the answer is yes. But as so often in life, maybe doing nothing is in itself an act of rebellion. All of this effort begs the age-old question: if you’re so busy prioritising the endless slog of lowering the baseline, what are you missing out on? And could those other things—the late night with friends, the ill-advised extra glass of wine, the family-sized box of Maltesers—be things that make you happy, and could happiness—whisper it—be an anti-ageing secret all of its own?
Platforms like Substack are awash with stories of midlife reinvention—of women, predominantly, who are fashioning a ‘second act’ for themselves; one in which they stop being people-pleasers and embrace a newfound freedom afforded by the double-whammy of fewer familial responsibilities and fewer fucks given. They are newly curious, newly confident, and ready for change. This is anti-ageing of a different kind; but one which, I believe, can also show on your face.
When the VISIA machine told me I looked seven years older than its cohort of women my age, a friend (to whom I was wailing inconsolably) said: “but the machine doesn’t know you. The machine doesn’t know what’s on the inside.” And she was right. The baseline, wherever it is, and wherever it ends up, is just one measure of age. Falling above it is not failing. It’s chronology. The Golden Girls may have looked older, but they had a great time doing it.
