In the summer, I received $70 designer anti-wrinkle cream as a giveaway at CityLine. Thinking I had no use for it yet, I put it in a bag at the back of my closet with the rest of my misfit items.
One day, many years down the road, I’ll be able to reap the suppleness of this high-line formula, but that won’t be for quite a while. Using it now, at age 22, would be a waste of good quality product…. Besides, no one my age uses such creams… right?
Think again. According to the article “Quest for eternal youth starts earlier,” featured on CNN.com in December, more and more people in their 20s are investing in cosmetic products that reduce and prevent signs of aging.
I don’t know why this surprised me. Maybe I just assumed that for young adults, using ordinary moisturizers, cleansers, and sun-block would qualify as “taking care of your skin.” But Joanne, a 24-year-old who has been using anti-aging products for two years believes “you might as well start now.”
She, however, had not been taking care of her epidermis in her earlier years. After having spent hours frying in tanning booths, as well as in the sun, she noticed the rays were damaging her skin.
If you ask me, this investment in anti-aging products among young adults is a vanity issue perpetrated by the media. The pressure to be attractive is not revolutionary by any means. The desire to grasp onto our youthful appearance, however, is disconcerting to me.
Like Mair Underwood, researcher at the University of Queensland quoted in the CNN article, I fear that this fixation on warding off the implications of aging will invoke all sorts of physical and mental issues. The aspiration to be youthful-looking is just one more neurosis that will peck away at us.
Body image (or the battle of the bulge, if you will), has been an obsession in day-to-day life, as well as in the news, for decades. In addition to this preoccupation with being thin and fit, there now seems to be the pressure to look young and supplicious.
As 25-year-old Tina Wells points out, the women in Desperate Housewives seem to have raised the bar for physical appeal. Both baby boomers, and their offspring(!) are feeling the weight-or lack thereof-of these finely chiseled creatures. If I look like Teri Hatcher in 25 years please send me back on the spaceship I came from.
I have always thought of the 20s as a time of mucho confusion- a period of unsettlement and uncertainty. This is a period I fancy as the “pre-mid-life crisis with a pinch and dash of excitement and anticipation.”
Where are we going? Who are we, and who will we become? I refuse to believe that we will continue in the obsessive spiral that values ultra-lean and luscious to the point of paralysis. We should be embracing the idea that we will grow comfortable with, and in, our not-so-perfect skin.
A good friend of mine once pointed out that she thinks wrinkles are great: They show you’ve laughed, lived, and have character.
Tag lines such as “50 is the new 30” uttered by the likes of Christie Brinkley, and Cheryl Tiegs make me wonder if this insurgence of young wrinkle-warriors will declare that 20 is the new… like, 12! And if we continue in this direction, what next? Doctors handing out tubes of anti-aging cream in the maternity ward for mothers to apply to their infants?
I admit I have dabbled in, and may continue to use, the sample anti-wrinkle moisturizer; to my defence though, it was free, and I am a student on a tight budget who was in need of moisturizer.
And so, it disgusts me, but does not surprise me, that 20-somethings are already fighting the war of the wrinkles. But try to prevent it as we may, we will all grow older. Rather than revolt against our bodies, we must rage against that which is keeping us from knowing ourselves.
