Joe Branson
Anti-wrinkle cream, where would we be without it? A cream with the ability to ‘iron-out’ wrinkles offering assurance to women (and increasingly to men) that, having rubbed this strange mixture of faintly scientific chemicals into their skin, they can leave the house without the embarrassment of looking their age.
What relief! It is a strange thing that we live in a society where, so obsessed with the way we look, people will rub a cream into their face genuinely believing it will remove creases caused by age. I would bet that not even half the buyers of face-creams could tell you what this substance is and how or if it even works.
Anti-wrinkle cream is a product predominantly targeted at women, but men are rapidly catching up with a surge of ‘for him’ brands popping up, playing on raging insecurities concerning the need to look good. People are pressured into believing that super-smooth skin is better, healthier and more aesthetically pleasing than natural, albeit wrinkly, skin. Continual adverts of plastic-looking women who, thanks to excessive plastic surgery can barely move their lips, engineer this social insecurity, creating an image of perfection and confidence to be found in smooth skin. We seem convinced that physical perfection needs to be sought and that buying cream X and massaging it into one’s face will solve all problems, because it will remove all wrinkles. By enforcing this anxiety in people, manufacturers of face cream are essentially profiting from insecurity.
This is just one of many follies in the whole ridiculous phenomenon, some of which I would now like to run through. Firstly, there is no tangible evidence that these creams will make any noticeable difference. In a recent experiment just 45 per cent of women using a specific brand said they noticed a difference; whether this difference was because they wanted to see a difference is obviously not taken into account. But from this statistic I cannot help but conclude that it might just be more effective to fill in the wrinkles with polyfilla. Secondly, the primary causes of wrinkles in are age and stress. To attempt to remove wrinkles, therefore, is an attempt to stop a natural process that should not be the subject of such shame. Face creams cannot obliterate age and stress, just the signs of it. In the face of the inevitable, we have to learn to be more comfortable in our own skin.
The final folly is that people believe they will be judged by the wrinkles on their face over the content of their character. People are convinced that they will have more confidence, satisfied that they look good in society’s eyes. And essentially this is the real problem, not the wrinkles; a social pressure which conditions people into seeking confidence, not in their abilities but in the way they look.
Why should people feel the need to change their appearance in this society? Why do people seek physical perfection? Looking good hasn’t always mattered this much; rather the pressure to look good has increased as society grows increasingly materialistic. You’d be hard pushed to argue that Western society has not become more superficial. More emphasis is placed on commodities. People are judged for what they own and for their social position inferred from their wealth. The need and pressure to remove wrinkles from one’s skin with expensive, ineffective products is a sad manifestation of these social pressures; not valuing a person for who they are but for what they have and how they look as a result.
Seeing plastic celebrities and TV advertisements full of ‘good looking’ wrinkle-free people enforces this conditioning. People shouldn’t need to conform to stereotypes to feel confident. Ultimately this pursuit of an air-brushed face will not enable us to maintain our health which, in the grand scheme of things, is considerably more important.
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