You Look Your Age. Great.

By Karen and Erica

In 1972, Susan Sontag wrote an essay, The Double Standard of Aging,” in which she remarked that “in an era in which people actually live longer and longer, what now amounts to two thirds of everyone’s life is shadowed by a poignant apprehension of unremitting loss.” Loss of youth, that is.

Why would that be? Because from the beginning women get a use-by date. We got the message—women are valuable when they are young and beautiful and can bear children, and then they are no longer much of anything. Logically, therefore, women became a target market for anti-aging products. Even at the tender age of 21.

For a while the use of the term came under attack when Allure Magazine, Italian Vogue, Madonna, Lauren Hutton, Helen Mirren, and Diane von Furstenberg, among others, refused to use the term. But code words like bright or translucent replaced the anti-aging trope, and we were back where we started.

Does this make any sense in 2023? No. The way people think about the link between beauty and age is stuck in a time when women were seen as having only one function on this planet. That time is over. Women who have lived long lives, who have learned all kinds of things, are beautiful, their beauty enhanced by life. Do we look dewey and fresh, waiting for life to open up for us? No. Do we look elegant and powerful, in control of our lives? Yes. Who wouldn’t want that? And by the way, age is not just a number. Age is a marker of accomplishment.

Of course, we take care of ourselves. We use whatever products make us look healthy and strong. We are all about image, after all. But goods and services that make you gorgeous have nothing to do with anti-aging. They are pro-aging. People like us—women who are active and engaged, having built on our long careers—look our age, and our age looks just great. We plan to keep it that way.

There is only one real anti-aging route, and most of us do not want to use it. Otherwise, if you are lucky, you will age. It will be obvious. You will start to glow, reflecting the piling on of years of life. You will know a lot, and that will show, for sure. You will throw caution to the winds. You will become friends with people you never would have met before. You will do things you would have been scared to do when you were younger, like traveling alone to an exotic country. You will start a business—for retired career women. You will wear red, even though people told you not to, and you will wear red with purple. And, yes, your face and body will look like the layered and luminous person you are. You have earned your cool and the right to flaunt it.

So get out there and let them see what 60, 70, 80, 90 looks like. Make them envious!