A Wrinkle in Time
I think it’s fair to say that my mother's face was prematurely wrinkled. It was a roadmap of intersecting lines, a study of crisscrossed patterns that ran across the avenues and planes of her face.
Imagine it with me as a piece of art, an enlarged black-and-white photo on canvas, hanging frameless in a gallery under a stark light, the play of shadows and light deepening the grooves in her skin.
Visitors to this gallery stand back and stare at the photo, romanticizing a story with one another, reflecting on how each line and wrinkle has its own woeful tale and was shaped by one of life’s great struggles or tragedies.
A small laugh escapes me as I come back to reality. The woman in the photo had a life just like everyone else’s. It was filled with brief moments of intense joy and sadness, and more ordinary days than I can count-days that add up to a life lived.
In truth, the face she wore was the result of a trifecta of her life’s preferences, a perfect storm of ingredients and actions that together became the Holy Grail of Wrinkle cocktails.
You see, my mother was a coffee enthusiast- no water for her, just coffee all day long. She was also a sun worshipper and could spend hours baking her face and body in the sun, no sunscreen for her, and lastly, the cherry crown on top of this trifecta soda was that she was a smoker for over 60 years of her life. While other factors may be smaller contributors, I think it’s safe to say that no amount of face cream, fillers, Botox, or anything else, save a facelift, would begin to iron out her face.
There was a brief moment when she actually considered getting a facelift. Some of her girlfriends were going for it and they asked if she wanted to join in? In the end, she knew she didn’t need it for her self-esteem, so she chose to leave her face alone.
Now I know I’ve made a big deal about her looks and wrinkles, but the truth is, they didn’t define her. It’s not what I remember first about the woman she was. I remember her gorgeous eyes, her keen intelligence, her fierce independence, her next-level skills as a master baker and decorator. I remember people inviting themselves to dinner weekly because she was such a great cook.
My mother could knit anything; she was a great writer and a teacher. She was a grandmother whose grandkids loved her dearly. She also had her Master of Economics degree, and she loved business and numbers and wanted to run a company. Unfortunately, she was born a few years too early for that reality.
Believe it or not, this article is not about my mother, but it is about us as women and how we value and view ourselves.
Ladies, let’s be honest. We tell ourselves that we are more than our looks (and I think we do want this statement to be true), but this ideology is not reflected or supported by the ‘tale of the tape ‘, so to speak. Women spent 47 billion dollars globally in 2023 on skincare. Proof that we are directing more energy towards changing our faces and bodies than enhancing our skills or education! Worse yet, this number is projected to increase to nearly 80 billion by the beginning of 2032.
Is there something wrong with wanting to look good? Not on the surface, but let’s drill down.
South Korea has become the number 1 country in the world for plastic surgery, with 46% of female college students in South Korea having had experience with cosmetic procedures. The average age is 21 years.
So why aren’t we changing the narrative and giving voice to new questions instead of allowing the beauty industry to keep us small and fearful of the next wrinkle or breakdown in our collagen?
For decades, we have let advertising tell us what is sexy, what is feminine, what is beautiful.
What if YOU were in charge? Would you want to change the message? Would you be ready to adopt a new narrative? In this new equitable world, women are establishing why hasn’t anyone seen this as an issue worth tackling?
Do you see men as concerned about their looks as women are? One thing I can tell you about men is that regardless of how they look, every one of them believes he is sexy and God’s gift to women.
By the time I was 11, I was using face cream and cleansers and sporting eyeliner like a pro. By the time I was 18, I had a degree in makeup art and was studying aesthetics, science, and everything I could about the world of beauty. It was 1986, and I had given birth to my first son and just opened my first esthetic salon.
I have had many different careers since then, but I still haven’t given up on 50-plus years of using day cream and night cream - Am I still concerned about the wrinkles? You can’t stop time, but I realize a lot of things today about my relationship with face cream and how it relates to my mother’s wrinkles.
When I was a teenager, people in their 60s looked old to me. They seemed to subscribe to a certain look and their haircuts. Well, they just screamed- we are old. Things are different today.
Women in their 60s and even 70s can, and do, look beautiful regardless of age.
I don’t want to look 24. Been there, done that. My value doesn’t come from dressing like a girl in her 20s. I also don’t subscribe to a uniform that says, ‘I’m a senior citizen”. I would rather the industry address how to be beautiful at any age than tell me there is only one kind of beauty and that it stops at age 24.
No one should tell you how to look. I would love for you to define what is beautiful for you.
There is something insidious happening across social media in the beauty industry that I do want to address.
Normally, I would have just let this go, but there are severe consequences resulting from the uptake of ads around wrinkle fillers, creams, etc.
I know I'm not the only one to notice the influx and frantic frequency of the ads showcasing anti-wrinkle, collagen, and skin firming ads throughout my social media. It seems to be one advert right after another. If it's not face yoga, it’s an ad for skin lightening, skin tightening, liquid Botox, eyebrow lifter. All a MUST HAVE.
These ads are not targeting women in their 60s and 70s. No, they aren’t even targeting women in their 40s and 50s. They are telling 30-year-olds they are in grave danger of wrinkles, and they better heed the warnings. Anything over 24 is too old. The issue goes beyond wrinkles. Many of these creams should not be used by pregnant women, but are promoted by beauty influencers and AI that have no idea what is safe and what isn’t, and for whom.
What really has me angry is that TikTok and Instagram are showcasing anti-wrinkle ads aimed at young girls.
Girls as young as 8 are turning up at dermatologists’ offices with rashes, chemical burns and other allergic reactions to products not intended for children’s sensitive skin. They even have a hashtag #SephorasKids
Some of these kids are so worried about wrinkles in their future, they have adopted the Korean 10-step beauty routine, searching for something they already have in spades. Perfect Skin! Hell, even I was enticed to use Vitamin C serum and in the past 2 weeks, my skin has never been worse because of high-end beauty creams.
When are we going to get smart and stop buying into every trend, every advertisement that promises eternal youth?
If we were meant to live forever, we would. Life has a cycle, and I would like to look the best I can at each one, but not through artificial means. The skin on my face isn’t what makes me sexy. The energy, confidence, poise, talent, and intelligence I project are what make me sexy, and dare I say, it’s what makes you youthful and sexy, too.
‘We aren’t meant to be Forever 21.
It was a great time while I was there, but if constantly showing off one’s boobs and butt is what makes a woman sexy, then I opt out. I’m tired of seeing women in their fifties competing against girls half their age, and I want to give my granddaughters a different ideal to live up to than to be wrinkleless at 30.
Why don’t we, ‘women’ as a collective, decide to create a new narrative and tell men and one another what the NEW SEXY is?
How about we are the Givers of life?
We can feed our children with our bodies. We can run in marathons, work in fields, sit in executive offices, create music, and paint masterpieces. We can feed families on a dollar a day. We are incredible and we are the mothers of inventions and the women behind every successful man!
Come on, let’s stop the crazy clickbait advertising to stop a wrinkle and enjoy solving one instead.
