Modern beauty standards have perpetuated a fear of growing older: Let’s change that
By SABRINA FIGUEROA — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with my oldest sister. She brought up how the skin on her face was beginning to form jowls — sagging folds of skin typically on the jawline. She expressed feeling the need to get Botox to get rid of them, along with other wrinkles forming on her face.
By the way she had been talking about herself, you’d think she was about 25 years older than she actually was. While I, as a younger sibling, would usually be inclined to agree just to get a reaction out of her, I didn’t see the point in perpetuating a beauty standard that makes us (and especially women) ashamed of getting older.
This concept — however modern it may seem due to its prevalence on social media — has been around for centuries. Ancient Greek women used to dye their gray hair with henna to make themselves appear younger, and both men and women in 18th-century Europe wore thick, sometimes tall wigs as symbols of status and health.
Facelifts — a type of cosmetic surgery that lifts sagging facial skin to make it appear tighter — have also been around since ancient times. However, it wasn’t until the emergence of Suzanne Noël, the first female plastic surgeon, that facelifts were seen as a feminist act, empowering women in the face of the beauty standards that told them wrinkled skin decreased their value as people.
Today, women go under the knife for facelifts and similar procedures at increasingly young ages. While they have been common among people over the age of 60 for decades, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that 32% of facelifts are now performed on patients ages 35 to 55. The use of Botox and other “anti-aging” products, from face creams to retinol, has also been promoted toward younger audiences in recent years: a stark change from conventional marketing tactics.
As much as we mask “anti-aging” procedures and products behind female empowerment, they provide merely an illusion of freedom from societal beauty standards. The more these procedures are performed, the more we perpetuate plump, bouncy, youthful skin as a societal standard — fueling our collective fear of aging.
This is not to say that we should shame women who feel the need to “fix” their insecurities, but rather, that we should think about why we feel the need to do anything to alter our appearances in the first place. Beauty is subjective, yet an ever-changing, strict definition of it has been used to assign morality and value to us throughout all our lives.
Although aging is scary, the beauty of it all is knowing you’ve lived. Smile lines and crows feet are evidence of the smiles and laughs you’ve had in your lifetime, wrinkles on your forehead are reminiscent of all the expressions you’ve made from anger to sadness to fright — your face is a display of what makes you human.
When I think about the older women in my life, a majority of them still dye their hair to hide their grays and some pick apart their skin in the mirror. It only reminds me that the ever-shifting beauty standard — and the lack of empathy for ourselves because of it — never goes away, and no one is immune to it. It’s not a war we can win unless we begin to truly empower ourselves in ways beyond our external physiques.
Life can be ugly, but that doesn’t make it meaningless. When society deems you “ugly” for simply living, revel in it. Your worth is not defined by beauty standards, nor material possessions — it comes from simply being human.
Written by: Sabrina Figueroa — sfigueroaavila@ucdavis.edu
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