The Airbrushing of Age

Graphic by Meher Yeda.

Imagine yourself in 40 years’ time. The year is 2060. You are sitting at the hairdresser awaiting your weekly blowout and pick up a Marie Claire to pass the time. As you flip through the pages and mindlessly scan the contents as women chatter in the background, your eyes land on a two-page advertisement for Clinique’s latest skincare products. 

“Is success taking a toll on your skin?” “Don’t let your skin be attacked by the external elements!” “40 is the new 70!” “Anti-aging breakthroughs with amazing results.” “Repair and remove the visible signs of age.” “Be wonderful without the wrinkles.” “Age youthfully.”

Although advertisement slogans like this don’t jar you now, in 40 years’ time they’ll hit a nerve. Once we start aging, fashion magazines won’t let us forget it. Whether it's our bodies giving into gravity, our skin wrinkling or our boobs sagging, advertisements will be with us every step of the way, politely reminding us that age is undesirable and less is always more. The consumerist spells that bewitch us do so incredibly subtly. By creating a deep sense of dissatisfaction within us, advertisers are able to plant small seeds of self-doubt into our minds, seeds that eventually sprout into towering plants of self-hatred, ejecting our last bits of confidence that we were so dearly clinging on to.

Exposure to constant advertising propaganda has caused consumers to become prey to the artful deception of beauty advertising. We began to see ourselves as the imitators of fashion photography rather than those same photos as absurd imitations of us. Why? When did the appeal of a man-made woman become more than that of a natural one? 

At some point in the past hundred years or so, it seems like advertisers made a conscious decision to neglect older women by pretending they don’t exist. Nowadays, magazine readers really have no perception of what an older woman looks like since fashion photographs of “older females” are modeled by women who are 20 years younger. Women’s media has turned into an adulterated and false medium in which nothing can be taken at face value. 

L’Oréal Paris — the number one anti-wrinkle brand — tells consumers to “stop living with your wrinkles and start seeing smoother, younger-looking skin.” Aishwarya Rai, age 43 at the time, was one of the poster women for L’Oréal’s Age Perfect line. Her wrinkle-free face is accompanied by promises of advanced repair on deep-set wrinkles. The pseudoscientific process claims that it “stimulates cell turnover from within,” dramatically lifting and retightening the skin of aging women.

Aishwarya Rai for L’Oréal.

In a magazine where bodies are trimmed, wrinkles are ironed, lips are plumped and waists are squeezed, can we really blame women for fearing age when fashion media portrays models as eternally youthful? 

The depiction of women in fashion magazines is a subtle and indirect violation of their confidence. Youthful pictures are scattered on every page, infiltrating the minds of women and forcing unrealistic and harmful beauty standards into otherwise unbothered minds. Although the act of picking up a Marie Claire at the salon seems like an act of free will, is it really? Are you really free when you are under constant manipulation? When you are draining your purse on products you neither want nor need?

like to think that the maturing of women is a beautiful thing; age marks a woman that has thrived, struggled, accomplished and felt. Yet why is it that the same lines that emerge and are celebrated on a man’s face are seen as a flaw on a woman’s? To erase age off a woman’s face is to erase part of her identity; you are erasing her memories, wisdom, history and experience. The “removable” wrinkles that accumulate around her eyes are from years of laughing and those “unsightly” creases that gather around her temples are from decades of reflection. Aging is a magnificent thing, so why is it so hard for beauty magazines to see it in the same way?

Magazines advertise female beauty standards in such a way that makes it seem that this is what men want from women when in fact it is actually what advertisers want from women. The ads that pollute our minds aren’t reflective of male fantasies, but rather are part of the successful advertising formula faithfully used in today’s beauty industry — a formula that is inherently disinterested in the self-esteem of older women. 

Revlon’s Age Defying makeup warns its consumer of her advancing age: “Don’t deny it. Defy it.” In this campaign, age is a war waged on a woman’s face. A war that can never be won, only slowed.

Elle Macpherson for Revlon.

Imagine a world where articles praised the splendors of visible age and marveled at how a woman’s life experiences impacted her body. Picture a society in which natural flaws were appreciated, not remedied, and advertisers advocated images of genuine, unedited women. A world where women weren’t constantly told to better their appearances but were instead encouraged to put their energy and money into more meaningful things. 

Sadly, this world might never exist. 

Sometime long ago, someone figured out that women consume more products if they are trapped in self-hating boxes in which they perpetually obsess over unachievable notions of beauty. Advertisers survive through the promotion of women's insecurities and rely on lowering their self-esteem to sell products and make profits. Magazines have to reinforce the idea that aging is undesirable because their revenue comes from companies that would go bust if women actually believed that their age looked good. These agencies depend on making women feel insecure enough about their appearances so that they spend their paychecks on overpriced and ineffective products that will give them temporary feelings of attractiveness. 

But what are advertisers really selling these women? The creams, serums, lotions and face masks are secondary purchases, disguises for what female consumers are really buying into. What advertising agencies are really selling women is the feeling of interminable ugliness and vulnerability; by strategically generating a self-hatred just deep enough, they are able to secure and profit off of the return of their aging customers.