In this op-ed, Amanda Yen explores how we started placing moral value on the aging process.
A beautiful blonde woman captions her video with a love letter to natural beauty: “Here is a reminder what the raw face of a 28 yr old girl who hasn’t had any ‘work’ done looks like.” She scrunches her nose at the camera and smiles. Even though it comes from a conventionally gorgeous person, it’s a departure from the often extremely filtered or made up faces that flood For You pages on TikTok. Or at least it should be.
The comments on the video tell an altogether different story. “Stay out of the sun, jeez woman,” reads one with more than 23,000 likes. “Lmao the sun is eating you up,” says another. A third tries to compliment the user: “You’re lovely and while 28 isn’t old ofc, you just look a lil older… I feel like you don’t wear SPF though.”
What was meant to be a reassuring video about natural beauty became a dogpile of comments on a woman’s skin care failures. And beneath the surface of these skin care-based comments is the indictment of allowing oneself to age at all, the allegation that she didn’t try hard enough to stay young. These kinds of comments are part of a larger attitude shift toward aging: We’ve always desired youth to some extent, but our hyper-online culture and increasing obsession with skin care has resulted in the idea of aging as a moral failure, something we can avoid if we just buy the right products.
Our skin has long been tied to our worth. White and light skin have historically been uplifted as the standard of beauty, especially among women of color in the US’s racial hierarchy. In many Asian cultures, too, fair skin signified wealth because it meant women didn’t have to work outside. Our complexions have also been used as proxies for our morality — think “skin as white as snow” as an allegory for a princess’s spiritual purity or innocence.
To be clear, antiaging products are not new, nor is how women have fixations with aging. To some extent, we’ve always had an ageism problem. It’s part of the patriarchal way we’re taught that our intrinsic value relies on our outward beauty, which is considered prime in our youth. For decades, women have gone to extreme lengths to appear young for as long as possible. The difference is that now that the antiaging market has skyrocketed, the failure or refusal to participate in it is seen as a charge against our moral worth.
In 2021, the antiaging market was valued at more than $62 billion globally, and it is widely projected to keep growing through the next decade. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reported a 19% increase in cosmetic procedures between 2019 and 2022.
As these markets grow and longer-lasting youth becomes more widely available, we can begin to see how the narrative that casts aging as an avoidable process is linked to capitalism. Our insecurities, that we’re not working hard enough to “look our age,” are profitable to cosmetics companies, manufacturers, and the influencers trying to sell us the next “life-changing product” to add to our lengthy skin care routines. Aging isn’t just a morally neutral process, it’s also an inescapable and extremely normal one.
Still, the it’s-your-fault narrative is not new. Much of the neoliberal thought that makes aging a failure of an individual's work ethic has also affected our attitudes toward weight gain in the recent past. Just as some attitudes toward weight gain have demonized the supposed laziness of those who are overweight, there is a view of aging that castigates the supposed laziness of those who are freckled or wrinkled. “You could have prevented this,” they seem to say, “if you had just tried a little harder.”
In this way, aging is a personal flaw that is manifested on our face. In that line of thinking, if you have bad skin or are “aging like milk,” it’s your fault because you didn’t take advantage of the preventative tools that exist for your consumption.
That logic completely undermines the factors in the appearance of aging that exist beyond individual control, such as genetics, socioeconomic status, and access to nutritious food. It also unfailingly supports capitalism: If individual choices reign supreme, then it is the individual’s responsibility alone to make the “right” decisions, which inevitably cost money.
And we are tempted to buy into it every time. Recently, videos of preteen girls in Sephora stores have gone viral, showing just how deep our obsession with aging goes. As much as Gen Z likes to pearl-clutch about Gen Alpha, we are ultimately feeding the root of the problem when we buy into the excessive anti-aging scheme. The only skin we’re saving is that of the executive whose job it is to keep us buying.
