Being a woman trying to age naturally today is like standing on a small stone in a sea of lava. That lava is societal pressures, a relentless march of social media posts and not actually knowing what someone of your age, or the decade up, is supposed to look like.
At 43, I find this pressure only intensifies with each year. From TikTok serving me videos of plastic surgeons saying that skincare is a waste of money because tweakments are better, to the language used in the beauty industry to make ageing seem like it’s a blight and a disease. Age-correcting, anti-ageing, wrinkle-correcting, wrinkle-reducing. All of it designed to make ageing seem like it is a problem that needs to be fixed, as opposed to an entirely natural stage of the birth and death cycle.
I curate my feed to see more positive messages around ageing, and in particular women who age naturally, yet it still feels inescapable.
Then I received a press release with the subject line: is it time for you to get preventative Botox?
The PR was peddling a client who is a plastic surgeon who offers “preventative” Botox as a service. I’ve received plenty of PR emails, but this one made me feel awful. The pointed personalisation of it instantly winched me out of my normal day and placed me inside a spiral tunnel of worrying about my looks. It felt particularly insidious because it played on the ageing fear narrative that every one of us is embedded with.
On top of this, potential adverse effects of preventative Botox are under increasing scrutiny. Overuse of it over a period of time can create skin that looks thin, particularly as the muscles get weaker. It may also lead to unnecessary problems – one dermatology expert told Vogue that freezing one area of the face may cause other muscles to overcompensate and develop wrinkles prematurely.
This isn’t intended to make people who get Botox for cosmetic reasons feel bad. Increasingly, people I know in my own social circle have it done or are considering it, and Botox usage is only increasing. A 2022 audit by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons found that demand rose 124 per cent compared with the previous year.
It’s more to say that if you want Botox, you now exist in a majority where it is completely acceptable to do so, while if you don’t want Botox or you are choosing to age naturally, you are fighting against an overwhelming narrative that promotes youthfulness as the holy grail.
In the same way that people choose Botox for their own reasons, my reason for aging naturally is because the idea of my face not looking like my face terrifies me more than getting wrinkles. When I had Long Covid, I couldn’t smell my own body for about eight months. Nothing prepared me for the sense of detachment, the grief I felt at losing a very fundamental and vital connection to my body through one of my senses.
Getting work done on my face will not reverse time, or even make me look like my younger self, because that time is gone. But it will make me look like a version of my past, and it will erase the real version of me that could exist in that present. Because when another year passes, I am continually trying to get back to where I was, rather than living in the moment.
I’ve tried to understand why people get Botox if it isn’t for medical reasons such as migraines or loose skin on the eyelids. The most common response I get is: “Because it makes me feel better.” It seems to come back to one inescapable thing: we believe youth is better and good, and ageing is bad and undesirable. While I want to be able to support someone’s choice to get Botox in a worry-free way, I do worry. Because if someone is getting Botox in order to stave off the signs of ageing, they are going to have to be locked into that process for life.
It is one thing to be aghast as your face changes in line with the natural timeline of ageing, it is quite another to have frozen parts of your face for years, and then be confronted with what it looks like when you stop.
That should make us question exactly what the anti-ageing industry is actually selling. Youth isn’t a value, an ethic, or something that is even possible to attain beyond the point in which it passes, which means you cannot truly ever purchase it.
Jessica DeFino, the beauty writer and critic, summarised the anti-ageing beauty standard brilliantly in her Substack The Unpublishable: “The history of this standard goes back centuries; it stems from systems of oppression. Patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism for sure. Anti-aging is the ultimate capitalist goal, because it can never be met, right? It’s physically impossible to anti-age. And to try to anti-age is to be a consumer for life.”
This only strengthens my resolve to dismantle the negativity and bias we have around ageing. It is one thing to have the option, and quite another thing to feel like you have to choose that option. Having spent four decades feeling pressured to look a certain way or never feeling like I match the standard, I’ve decided enough is enough.