Fountain of Youth

A few weeks ago I attended a funeral. Beforehand, I was fixing my hair in a mirror when I found my first grey. I thought for a moment about irony and I thought about telling my mother, who found her first grays at fourteen and has been regularly dying them into obscurity ever since. I am twenty-one years old now, and I am aging. I will be aging for the rest of my life. When I turn on the television, open any social media, or listen to the conversations of older women in my life, I hear a whole host of suggestions. 

Start using retinol early. Exfoliate frequently because it can minimize even the first hint of wrinkles. Have you looked into that new serum? You know, preventative botox is such a seamless procedure these days. I’m sure you’re evenly applying your SPF to your face and neck. Speaking of, maybe we should be avoiding direct sunlight entirely. Oh, she’s aged gracefully; she’s aged poorly, bless her heart. 

The most desirable outcome, it seems, is to never age at all.

This of course is impossible, and so we put excessive time and money into a beauty standard of youth which eludes us more with every birthday. But where does this obsession come from, and whom does it affect?

“The prestige of youth afflicts everyone in this society to some degree,” said Susan Sontag in her 1972 essay entitled “The Double Standard of Aging,” “but men rarely panic about aging in the way women often do… This society offers fewer rewards for aging to women as it does to men. Being physically attractive counts much more in a woman’s life than in a man’s, but beauty, identified as it is with youthfulness, does not stand up well to age.” 

I was able to rattle off the above list of serums, retinols, moisturizers, and procedures without researching their uses because they are aimed towards me, as a woman. I have always known subconsciously that they are meant to prevent signs of age, and I have understood that it is expected for me to begin using them in time. We’ve all seen Jennifer Aniston, Helen Mirren, or any number of other actresses in commercials for this-or-that skincare line, camera focused on flawless (edited) skin and chic (dyed, with the roots professionally touched up) hair. These women have apparently done it—they have successfully prolonged youth. We, as women ourselves, must be underperforming if we do not do the same. So how can we live up to these expectations? Well, we’ll just have to buy that product they’re advertising. 

When we do just that and it changes nothing, we only become more discouraged. We develop insecurities about each and every developing sign of time, and a vitriolic relationship with our own reflections. Cosmetic companies develop more marketing campaigns and generate yet more profit, and so the cycle continues. The standard of beauty centers around youth particularly in the West, with a special hold in the United States. In largely developed nations like ours where rates of infectious disease and infant mortality—both standards often used to measure the wellbeing of a society—are comparably low, we have time on our hands to dwell on things that seem unimportant in parts of the world still addressing these major issues. Other cultures view living beyond a certain age as something to celebrate, rather than something to hide at all costs. Over time, age has remained culturally significant in many places, and is even with resilience, wisdom, and the upholding of traditions.

So, to women in the West particularly: this isn’t all to say that you shouldn’t use a retinol or a serum if you want to, and I want to be clear that I am absolutely in favor of applying daily sunscreen. What I do think we should contemplate, though, is any willingness to modify every element of our lives and thoughts to prevent what is entirely unavoidable. The subliminal messaging that we as women have value and importance as people only while we are young and fertile has wrongly convinced us that aging diminishes our worth. When you start to feel its effect as you study your reflection, remember that you have value as a human being at fourteen, and twenty-one, and eighty-five, and that value is completely impervious to the lines on your face and neck and the way your knee cracks now when you stand. 

I have always thought that the streak of silver that runs along my mother’s temple, the one that began when she was fourteen, is beautiful. Someday I will probably have it too. I will have more than one wrinkle in my forehead from every time I have scrunched my brow in pursuit of an education. The laugh lines around my eyes and mouth will come with time; after all, my friends are very funny people. 

This is natural and inevitable. This is time and love and community and learning, and a thousand other things just as deeply human as the aging process, and certainly no less important. 

Strike Out,

Written by: Sarah Singleton

Edited by: Sarah Singleton

Graphic by: Hallie Meers