When my mother was 36 – the age I am now – she made only two concessions to the signs of ageing. She coloured her hair with an at-home kit to hide her greys and she started using a moisturiser. Both were inexpensive, and she tells me that she never felt any real pressure to do more – or to spend more – in an effort to hold back the years.
How very different is the landscape of my mid-thirties. Every single day, I am bombarded with suggested methods, treatments, gadgets and gizmos to wage war against the passing sands of time and how those passing sands are showing up on my face and body.
The promise of the appearance, at least, of eternal youth is all around me. It’s there in the suspiciously line-free faces of my friends, in advertisements for aestheticians that flash up between my Instagram stories, and in the smooth facades of celebrities who are approaching 60 but do not look a day over thirty.
Listen, I’m tempted. I have no moral or ethical issue with Botox and fillers, or red light therapy masks, or Reformer Pilates classes that promise to ward off the dreaded middle age spread, or the tape that TikTok tells me to stick on my face while I slumber to prevent wrinkles, or any of the myriad methods of keeping our faces and bodies looking younger than our years.
I’m vain. I’ve done dumber things than tape my mouth shut as I sleep to look good. A full face of makeup, a cute outfit, a fresh ‘do – these are some of the pleasures of life. But as I approach my late thirties, I’ve noticed my vanity coming into direct conflict with any sense of financial prudence. Because this anti-ageing malarkey does not come cheap.
A botox injection in a woman’s lips ((Alamy/PA))
Botox injections in three areas of your face administered, as recommended, every four months in a London clinic will set you back around £1,140 a year. The red-light therapy mask my friend raves about is a snip at £400. A monthly membership at a Reformer Pilates studio is around £200. Even that face tape will cost you £21 – let that sink in, £21 for a few scraps of tape.
There’s big money to be made in empowering women to intervene in the ageing process. The global anti-ageing market grew from $25billion in 2016 to nearly $37billion in 2021. And I get it. We’ve heard plenty about how women become invisible after a certain age. Who wants that?
If you want to keep those wrinkles at bay, you’ll be handing over a grand a year for the rest of your life
But most of these procedures and treatments are not a one-and-done deal. If you want to keep those wrinkles at bay, one visit to the aesthetician is not going to do the trick. You’ll be handing over a grand a year for the rest of your life. There are, of course, other options, but they’re not cheap either.
Like surely all women, I do not enjoy watching myself age. I dislike the unbudgeable crease in the centre of my forehead that showed up a couple of years ago and the inch of grey regrowth I’m currently sporting between salon visits.
But right now I don’t have the cash to splash on an aesthetic war against Old Father Time. As much as I’d love the skin, tits and butt of my twenties back, I don’t have the dosh available to plough into the quest every year. And I hesitate to clamber onto the treadmill of anti-ageing. I suspect it’s difficult to step off again and I have a feeling that that money would be better spent on a holiday or fixing the leak in my roof. I also cannot help but notice that while there is a growing market for men’s anti-ageing skin care, my male friends are not receiving anything like the push to spend their cash on looking young that my girlfriends and I get daily.
But for all my bluster, in my most private moments, I worry that I’ll regret my decision. I fear that my rich friends will look like twenty-somethings at 60 while I will be one of the few that has been ravaged by the passing years. Perhaps people will pity me and whisper how sad it is that I couldn’t afford Botox and fillers.
Perhaps people will pity me and whisper how sad it is that I couldn’t afford Botox and fillers
For now, I’m resisting the urge to smooth out my wrinkles. Learning to live with them would certainly be kinder to my bank account. But I do wonder: how long will I be able to hold out as the faces around me grow ever firmer, fresher and smoother?