I’m sure most people have heard the phrase “never ask a woman her age,” but have any of us ever stopped to ask ourselves why? In an age when ten-year-old girls use skincare and makeup to look older, at what point does this reverse, and when does looking her age suddenly become the worst thing a girl can be?
From Instagram to TikTok young women and girls are being overwhelmed with advice, tutorials, and hauls. Influencers who present themselves as the viewer’s “sister” or “friend” are being paid thousands to promote and sell beauty products to those who look up to them, and aspire to just look just like them.
They tell us not to use straws as they cause wrinkles around the mouth, not to smile too wide because we’ll get creases by the eyes, and we are even being recommended to inject Botox into our foreheads as a ‘preventative’ measure. Women are being taught to fear aging, and that the only way to absolve this fear is prevention by any means necessary. It is through this cycle that the cosmetic industry, as well as the social media industry, profit off of our artificial need for some semblance of control.
Susan Sontag describes aging as a crisis of the imagination. It is a moving fear, as each decade passes the anxiety transfers to the next multiple of ten; twenty fears thirty, thirty fears forty, and so on. Cis men on the other hand are not subject to an equal amount of terror, in most cases their worth is not primarily tied to their attractiveness. Society pities a woman who is not married by forty, at thirty-five a woman who has a baby is labelled a ‘geriatric mother’.
To appear young is to appear eligible, fertile, and innocent. Men are allowed to go grey, to gain what is referred to as a ‘dad bod’, to get wrinkles on their foreheads; it only makes them appear more mature, refined, and in juxtaposition to their female counterparts, still eligible. There is no version of a ‘dad bod’ for mothers, after carrying a baby there is an expectation that our bodies will return to how they looked ten months prior. Sure, men experience aging with uncertainty, even apprehension – but women are taught to experience it with shame.
Globally, the beauty industry is worth well over $500 billion and according to Euromonitor International, this number grew by 9.3% in 2023 and is forecast to grow by 8.4% per year through 2028. In being encouraged to “take care of ourselves” by spending hundreds of pounds on expensive products and treatments so as not to fall behind our peers, money is being put directly into the pockets of CEOs and multi-millionaires, which is then funnelled back toward more marketing, targeted ads, and influencer brand deals. Profit is precisely the reason we are encouraged to overconsume, the more products we are told we need, the more we purchase, the more money we make for the beauty industry.
But I want to be able to age with excitement, not to be met with pity from my peers or a wider culture. As women we should be proud to inform others of our age, and as Sontag puts it: “Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.”
