By Karen and Erica

The global anti-aging market is expected to be worth over $250 billion by 2028. Quite a stunning number.

We all know that from the time we are quite young, women are introduced to the notion of a sell-by date. Older women are sent the message we are past our sell-by date after about 40, and the only thing we can do about it is to take measures to hide the physical manifestations of living successful and complicated lives. How? By using skin creams meant to smooth out wrinkles, a marker of age and ugliness. As put by The Conversation:

The target consumer, and so audience for this narrative of accelerated ageing, is overwhelmingly women – unsurprisingly. Men and women age roughly at similar speeds, but the language and pictures around anti-ageing treatments suggest that women have far and away the most to worry about. Any online search will reveal a standard picture of a young woman scrutinising her reflection and hastily applying cream to her face.

The message is clear: it’s a race against time. Many companies advise women to start using these treatments in their 20s. Men worry about ageing too, but advice for their skin is packaged as maintenance rather than emergency.

The fear of age is the whole point. Obviously, as long as we remain alive we will get older, whether we wrinkle or not. Face treatments will not change that. So the real message is: if we don’t have wrinkles we can fake being younger, and if we can fake being younger people will think we are more likable.

How did this all start? The Conversation suggests that venerated doctors of ancient times, and Victorian literature, are at least partly to blame.

Victorian physicians were influenced by classical thinking. Hippocrates and Aristotle both argued that women aged faster than men. Despite Day’s progressive view that old people were worth specialist care, Day still theorised that women were in the process of declining into old age by around 40. Men, on the other hand, supposedly didn’t show signs of ageing until they were around 48 or 50. Day stated that, in the race to the grave, women were at best biologically five years older than a man of the same age and at worst ten years older.

Scientific literature seems to suggest the subject has become rather more complicated—now that we actually study women as well as men, and now that we realize women and men are biologically different right down to their chromosomes.

We now know that one marker or measure alone cannot capture the complexity of biological aging, and with the various machine-learning methods becoming available, we should consider opting for more ‘all-inclusive’ approaches. Depending on the outcome of interest, factors across different domains should be considered as explanatory variables and assessed for their sex specificity and interactions. An important point worth noting is that, as there are now many longitudinal studies with repeated measurements of biological aging markers available, these resources should be used to revisit or reformulate some of the aging theories – or propose completely new ones.

So why—other than rank sexism—has the perception been that women age faster than men? There seems to be some evidence that because after menopause women lose estrogen, that causes their faces to change. If this is correct, it would validate the idea that face cream might mitigate wrinkles. But that has little to do with actual aging, which is a process that is stopped by only one event.

We are all for making ourselves look as good as we can. As we have said, owning our age does not mean going to the dogs. So we are happy to use whatever is available to make us look good. Why not? But not to look younger. We are proud of our years, and happy (most days) to display the faces of women who have had lovely long lives.

If some of those marketing the $250 billion of anti-aging products want to get even richer, they might think about marketing their products as pro-aging, instead. That’s the real goal, after all.