AM I ALLOWED TO AGE?

In a World Filled with Botox and Laser Treatments

On my 18^th birthday I went to IHOP to celebrate for obvious reasons. (It’s an incredible restaurant.) During the festivities, someone asked the waitress how old she thought I was. After a brief assessment, she guessed 13. I was crushed. As a teenager, I felt burdened by how young I looked. It felt like just another barrier between my boring reality and the life I wanted filled with boyfriends, parties and an actual social life. But people constantly told me it was something I would appreciate when I got older and, no surprise here, they were right. Once I hit my 20’s, I relished when others acted shocked that I was years older than they’d assumed. It was a thrill! A delight! To look young in an ageist society was the equivalent of having a platinum credit card most people applied for but got denied. It didn’t solve all my problems, but it did give me a leg up.

Then I turned 30. And my luck ran out. Suddenly, when I told people my age they would just nod as if that made sense, and it wasn’t a shock to their very core. (Rude!) I started to discover more wrinkles around my eyes and friends began giving me tips on Botox and filler. I found myself investing in more expensive skin care and worrying that I hadn’t taken the necessary precautions during my youth to avoid the thing that, if you are lucky, is absolutely supposed to happen to you.

Logically, I know that getting older is a privilege. But it is hard to fight the messaging that no one should be able to tell it is happening. Millennials are far from the first generation to face this challenge. For generations, women, especially, have been primed from childhood to know that our societal value will go down as soon as we have “aged out” of desirability. We all grew up with stories of older women being forgotten and cast aside for younger models. But what feels different about this moment in time is that a growing number of women—through what I can only assume is a mixture of new treatments, money and great genetics—have seemed to escape what was once thought to be inevitable. Celebrities like Anne Hathaway look younger now they did in their 20’s. It’s hard to turn on the TV and avoid seeing faces that have been plumped, filled and manipulated to varying degrees of success. Now that these interventions to avoid aging at all costs have become so mainstream and effective, I find myself wondering, am I not allowed to look older?

The fight against aging is yet another area where my values feel misaligned with the reality of modern culture. While I want to be someone who wholly rejects the pressure to capture a youthful appearance—no matter the cost or approach—I also live in 2025 and have to look at videos and pictures of myself all the time. I feel annoyed that my new eye cream hasn’t made any noticeable difference in my fine lines, and I suspect that the reason I’m not more enamored with my new red hair is simply because it is attached to a face that is no longer dewy and glowing. I’m starting to understand that my internal battle with my changing looks boils down to a missing piece in my conception of the world:

I haven’t yet figured out how to separate beauty from youth.

What does it even mean to look beautiful and not also look young for your age? Is such a thing possible???

I know that I want it to be. The right answer to accepting the process of aging isn’t to reject my appearance all together. I don’t want to throw up my hands and shout: Well at least I don’t have to brush my hair not that I have wrinkles! Who cares about my clothes after I turn 40! That is just another way of giving in to ageism and giving up on myself. What I want is to find a way to embrace that looking older is a part of my aesthetic journey rather than viewing it as the end of it (or as a signal that I must figure out a way to turn back time so help my god).

I suspect that in addition to the more visceral biological/reproductive reasons for prioritizing youth, many of our fears around aging can be traced to our fears around dying. It is impossible to avoid that getting older means we have less time left alive. When I see the changes in my face, I am reminded that so much of my life and career is already behind me. And this actuality comes with unwelcome adjustments. I now have to make practical decisions about how I spend my time in order to financially support my family rather than throwing caution to the wind and spending my money on a short film because I miss being on set and acting. And, while it would make more sense for me to postpone trying to get pregnant until my husband’s next career move is clear and I am further along in the grieving process, I simply can’t afford that extra time anymore. The added constraints of being older are a weight that feel in stark contrast to the freedom and opportunity that looking young used to afford me.

When I look in then mirror, I am being faced with both my aging skin and my own mortality.

Obviously getting Botox and laser treatments are one option for punting this existential discomfort down the road. And I’ll admit that I haven’t ruled them out. I am allowed to do whatever I want to my body without judgment or shame. But the bigger task isn’t figuring out how to outrun looking older. It’s reshaping my relationship to death itself. I bet you didn’t expect us to wind up here from a commentary on the prevalence of skin treatments, but it’s where the thread has led me.

If I continue to live in fear of dying, I will continue to live in fear of aging. If looking my age is a constant reminder that I am running out of time to accomplish everything I want for myself, of course I will see looking older as threatening. Similarly, if I buy into the notion that only the young can be beautiful and only the beautiful can be fully appreciated in the world. However, if I can figure out a way to reject these two premises and lean into the idea that my life isn’t of less value the more I live of it, my potential—both in my external appearance and my internal experience—open back up.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to figure out how to age gracefully but I didn’t really understand what that meant or how to do it. Lately, though, I feel I have gotten closer to figuring it out. Maybe I simply wasn’t old enough to understand it before.

xoxo,

Allison

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