The Beauty of the Marketers

I thought I would share my beauty regime with you. It’s extensive and incredibly expensive. I’m not sure that you will be able to cope with it. Are you ready…sure…? Okay here goes:

I wash my face with water.

Fin.

I am in my mid 40s. I have been ageing for a shade over 40 years. We are all ageing, from the moment that we are born. That’s how life works. That’s nature for you. For the first 20 years, we are glad to be ageing and want to do it faster. From then on, we try to stop ageing.

It is a bit like King Canute (or Cnut — depending on your view) trying to turn back the tide. We age as we get older, which is inevitable. Trying to stop it is irrational, illogical and impossible.

According to Orbis Research, last year global sales in anti-ageing products totalled $250 billion. That’s a staggering amount. Why are we willing to spend so much on how old we look?

Given that ageing is natural, why do we want to appear younger? It makes more sense to be proud of our age. To show how successful we are in getting to our current age without encountering any deadly illnesses, intertwining our bodies with a double-decker bus or befriending human eating animals. Historically, fashion has centred around wealth. People wanted to appear wealthy. Surely reaching a good age is a sign of wealth: having enough food to eat, being able to afford medical care and a safe lifestyle. So we should all want to look older! To show how rich we are!

Maybe life has become so safe that we take our longevity for granted. We don't want to look older, because we are so confident of reaching old age that we are able to worry about looking younger. A form of inverted snobbery. We are so wealthy that we want to look younger than we are. Looking older is what poor people do. Looking younger than we are suggests that we are healthier; we don’t have the afflictions that affect older people. Looking younger than we are suggests that we have enough spare money to spend on our appearance.

I think people spend so much money on anti-ageing treatments because of clever marketing. Marketers are great at creating a problem to sell us a product to treat it. Let’s use my hair as an example. As a teenager, I had long straight hair. Bigger hair was the thing, so I spent my small amount of money from my student job (as a fishmonger — I’m sure that will be a story at some point) on mousse and gel. About 5 years ago (around 30 years later) long straight hair (just like mine was as a teenager) was very popular. But my hair had developed some curls, so to be fashionable I would have had to straighten it, making it look like it did as a teenager, which wasn’t fashionable back then! I liked the curls so decided I didn’t care what adverts said I should look like. Anti-ageing marketing is similar. We are shown examples of beauty, which are young. Then we are sold products that can help us to attain that. It has been marketed so well that it now seems normal for adults to want to look younger. It is a theme on tv, in stories and in the wider media. It is generally accepted. But it needn’t be. Just because we are told that looking younger is desirable doesn’t mean we have to agree.

If we all decide that looking old is what we are going to strive towards, the marketers would develop products to make us look older! If we strive to look around the age we are, it is very difficult for marketers to target us. You can’t be sold a product that makes you look like you already look!

Everyone enjoys different things. And we all chose to spend our money in different ways. If you enjoy altering how you look — go for it. But make sure you are choosing to do it. Not doing it because marketing is creating pressure on you and making you feel like you have to.