Me being my authentic self.
Never in human history have so many products and services been available to make ouselves achieve the goal of looking younger and more attractive. Day creams, night creams, neck creams, hand creams exfoliators, spray tans, mascaras, antiage serums, cellulite creams, face masks, concealers, shaving creams, beard trimmers, foundations, lipsticks, home waxing kits, recovery oils, pore correctors, eyeliners, Botox, manicures, pedicures, microdermabrasion (a strange cross between modern exfoliation and medieval torture, by the sound of it), mud baths, seaweed wraps and full-blown plastic surgery. There are facial-hair trimmers and nose-hair trimmers and pubic-hair trimmers (or body groomers). You can even bleach your anus if the mood so takes you.
In this age of the beauty blog, make-up vlogger, and online workout instructor, there has never been such a plethora of advice on looking good. We are bombarded with diet books, gym memberships, dream abs workouts, action hero workouts, and face yoga videos we can access via YouTube. And there are even some digital apps and filters to enhance what the products can’t. If we so desire, we can make ourselves into our own unrealistic aspirations and create an ever-wider gap between what we can see in a mirror and what we can digitally enhance. Women, and increasingly men, are doing more than ever to improve their appearance.
Yet, despite all our new methods and tricks to look better, a lot of us remain unhappy with our looks. The largest global study of its kind, published in Time Magazine back in 2023, suggested that millions of people were not satisfied with how they look. In Japan, for instance, 38 per cent of people were found to be seriously unhappy about their appearance. The interesting thing about the survey was that it showed how you feel about your looks is surprisingly more determined by the nation in which you live than by, say, your gender. In fact, all over the world, levels of anxiety about how you look are moving towards being as high in men as they are in women.
So why are so many people unhappy with their looks? A few reasons, it seems.
While we have an increased ability to look better than ever before, we also have much higher standards for how we want to look.
We are bombarded with more images of conventionally beautiful people than ever before. Not just via TV and cinema screens and billboards, but via social media, where everyone presents their best, most filtered selves to show the world.
As people generally become more neurotic, worries about appearance increase. According to the authors of another survey (for the American National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2024), people who were unhappy with their looks had “higher neuroticism, more preoccupied and fearful attachment styles, and spent more hours watching television”.
Our looks are presented as one of the problems that can be fixed by spending money (on cosmetics, fitness magazines, the right food, gym memberships, whatever). But this is not true. And besides, looking conventionally attractive does not make you stop worrying about your looks. Many very good-looking people, models, for instance, are more worried about their looks than people who don’t walk down catwalks for a living.
We still aren’t immortal. All these products aiming to make us look younger, glowing, and less death-like are not addressing the root problem. They can’t actually make us younger. Clarins and Clinique have produced a ton of anti-ageing creams, and yet the people who use them are still going to age. They are just thanks in part to the billion-euro marketing campaigns aimed at making us ashamed of wrinkles and lines, and a bit more worried about ageing. The pursuit of looking young accentuates the fear of growing old. So maybe if we embraced growing old, embraced our wrinkles and other people’s wrinkles, maybe marketers would eventually have no customers anymore who pay horrendous amounts of money for these chemical cocktails.
Embrace, don’t resist. The way to get rid of age anxiety might be the way to get rid of all anxiety. By acceptance, not denial. Don’t fight it, feel it. Maybe don’t inject yourself with Botox. Do some knifeless mental surgery instead. Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.
