Why do we do it, eh? Why, despite all the evidence to the contrary, do we keep going where we’ve repeatedly gone, doing what we’ve always done and throwing good money after bad in the pursuit of what society considers beautiful. By which I mean youth, and the smooth, plump, line-free skin that accompanies it. Whether it was Einstein who said it or any number of other smart people: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Or to put it more prosaically, “if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.”
This, in short, is me and moisturiser. I have been hooked on skincare for 35 years and unlike most of my other borderline addictions that have abandoned me far more than I have abandoned them as the years have passed, skincare and me, well, we seem to be bonded for life. Idiocy, I know. But just you try getting in between us.
I can legitimately blame women’s magazines for this. Not because they sold me a pup, but because, from the age of 23 until I left Red at 46, I was the lucky and very happy beneficiary of free beauty products. More specifically, free skincare products. From L’Oréal, Body Shop, Simple, Nivea and Lush (or Cosmetics To Go as it was then, which I remember only because it was how I met one of my best lifelong friends, Nancy) in my first job as Practicals Assistant at Chat magazine* (*If you’re wondering what the hell a Practicals Assistant is, that’s what you call the department that has two people covering fashion, beauty, home, food and shopping on a magazine with no frills and even fewer airs and graces) to the Crème de la Mer, Sisley, Chanel, Dior and Lauder of my glossy Red days. I had tons of the stuff. Everybody I knew got it for birthdays, Christmases and just because. My friends loved me. My mum wanted for nought on the skincare front. And I still had several large plastic boxes crammed with the overflow in the (not small) cupboard under the bathroom sink. I got other stuff too – swanky hair care, fragrance, all the makeup you could want – but it was skincare that snared me.
Skincare was my drug, my fix, my ally, my saviour, my blind spot. It still is, but now I have to pay for it. And how I do.
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? I would no more spend a fortune on a mascara or lipstick than, say, eat veal. I don’t buy designer or even designer-ish clothes. I have always drawn the line at spendy fragrance, even when I could afford it. But show me a moisturiser approaching six figures that promises to Benjamin Button me by Friday and I’ll have to actively talk myself out of believing it’s an investment in my own future. (Don’t worry, I’ve never actually done it.)
Despite decades of working beauty-journalism-adjacent, attending beauty launches that number in their hundreds as an editor who had to keep the advertisers on-side and being on the receiving end of thousands more press releases, my skincare knowledge is, to say the least, negligible. I’m not interested in the detail, you see. I’m a skincare marketer’s dream. I don’t invest in the science, although I do like the veneer of intelligence that the austere, vaguely lab-like packaging of The Ordinary and The Inkey List bestows. I don’t understand more than half of the jargon – I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled ‘peptides’ and I still can’t tell you what they are. And I still don’t really understand why I’m supposed to need a serum, despite having had a one-to-one explanation from Sunday Times Style beauty columnist India Knight. (You can hear it here.)
I am, in short, a regular punter where skincare Is concerned. I am all about the promise. If it says it on the tin I’m prepared to suspend disbelief. Gimme! I can’t explain it or justify it. It’s certainly not a level of gullibility I would tolerate in any other area of my life.
As someone with naturally dry skin that freckles into blotches at the first ray of spring sunshine and has never had a tan that didn’t come out of a bottle, I started with a basic wish not to burn and flake. All I wanted was a strong-ish SPF that didn’t feel and look like wearing a Hazmat suit. It took a surprisingly long time to find one. Then, like buses, several came along at once.
Since then I’ve progressed through moisturising, de-stressing, hydration, and spent a lot of days I won’t get back in search of glow. I’ve retinoled and vitamin C-ed and hyaluronic acid-ed. I’ve tried moisturisers containing mushrooms and matcha and God knows what else, in pursuit of… what, exactly? What do I think I’m going to find at the bottom of all those pots, tubs, tubes and bottles? Could it be the one thing I’ve always, proudly, loudly, refused to buy into? The one thing even this gullible skincare stan knows isn’t possible: anti-ageing?
Five or so years ago I felt like a bit of an outlier in my vocal disavowal of a molecule’s ability to reverse the clock. The media and beauty industry seemed like a sealed unit when it came to that kind of criticism, the beauty editors who were prepared to criticise it could be counted on one hand (for good reason, they needed to work); “anti-ageing” was big business and looked only to be getting bigger. But when I canvassed women in midlife for The Shift book, late in 2019, I soon realised I’d tapped into a seam of rage that dwelt extremely near the surface.
‘Hate anti-ageing as a statement. Hate hate hate it!’ Helen, 45
‘I hate the phrase anti-ageing or anything similar that’s labelled with the word “age”. Age doesn’t matter, mindset and attitude do.’
Joanna, 52
‘The anti-ageing messaging winds me up. I’ll take getting older, as some of my friends have had this privilege denied to them.’
June, 46
‘I loathe the whole anti-ageing thing. What’s wrong with looking our age? Why is every line and wrinkle something to be fixed? There’s a whole generation of women who will never know how they would have looked at 65. That’s a loss.’ Fi, 51
And that’s just for starters.
In a nutshell they had one message for the beauty industry: You can take your anti-ageing schtick and shove it.
This is old news now, of course. The beauty industry being what it is – a billion dollar behemoth that doesn’t successfully separate us from so much of our hard-earned cash by ignoring the zeitgeist – was quick to see that women were growing tired of being kept in the dark and fed crap. A rebrand was in order. And sharpish. Bye bye anti-ageing, hello pro-ageing, youthifying (is that a word?) and even that previously taboo word ‘menopause’ began to put in an appearance. Some still promised to banish or fill wrinkles, but the focus had shifted to looking less tired, less baggy, saggy and puffy. Firmer and plumper… You see what they did there?
In the midst of all this, did I, in my wisdom, bin my ever-expanding skincare collection and pledge to save my money and my labour? Reader, I did not. As the Dr Brandt’s No More Baggage Eye Cream that’s currently on its way across the atlantic to me can attest. (Oh Instagram algorithm, you know me better than I know myself.)
Because the fact is, despite what I know to be the truth (that a great moisturiser is just that, it stops my skin flaking, drying and getting too tight, and that, my friends, is that), a small part of me still gets a little vanity boost whenever someone tells me how great my skin is, or says that I haven’t aged at all. (Total BS obviously.) And that same small part, rather than crediting, oh, I don’t know, the fact I rarely go in the sun, don’t smoke, no longer drink and actually, occasionally, get a decent night’s sleep (and that great uncontrollable genetics) prefers to believe that my skincare army is all that lies between me and skin that might, God forbid, look like it belongs to a woman in her late 50s. Which is nuts given that I freely reveal that it does almost every day of the week on social media.
The weird thing is, having said all this, I revere wrinkles. I endlessly pin pictures of gorgeous older women with faces alive with lines on Pinterest and post them to Instagram. Wrinkles say life. Wrinkles say experience. Wrinkles are beautiful. I know that. Objectively. Subjectively, I’m human. I still pay disproportionate attention to the other messages society is sending me. I still get a little buzz when a new moisturiser that promises a little bit of magic crosses my threshold.
I remember when I was about 23 or 24, I’d been promoted to features writer on Chat magazine and was assigned a feature about forgiveness. One of the case studies I was sent to interview was a woman from Birmingham whose son had been killed in so-called friendly fire early in the Gulf War. She was warm, kind and funny. She called a spade a spade. Her heart was irretrievably broken. She wore that on her face. I don’t know how old she was. Somewhere in her 40s maybe? Like I said, I was 23ish and she just looked, well, old to me. Her pain was literally etched on her face, and she dealt with it by turning her wrinkles into a punchline. “Pillow face”, she called it and joked about getting up an hour earlier to iron her face. I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about and my cluelessness was clearly evident. “You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. (I apologise if this sounds flippant given the gravity of the subject we were discussing, but this was the kind of woman she was, it was how she got by.)
I never forgot her. Not because of the pillow face comment, although that stuck with me, too. Her courage, her warmth and her ability to laugh in the face of unimaginable (to me, then) pain. She had lived and she wore it, if not with pride then definitely not with shame. And the very first time I woke up with a pillow’s creases embedded in my cheek, a couple of decades later, her words were right there. So this was pillow face.
While it’s easy to appreciate the abstract beauty of wrinkles. To aspire to becoming a woman who is comfortable in her own skin, who looks in the mirror and if not loves it then at least is at ease, it takes a hide more Teflon than mine to be immune to the daily bombardment of messages telling you that it’s not good enough. Must. Try. Harder.
The thing is, change is hard, isn’t it? Especially when you’re surrounded by a cacophony of voices that tell you there are two choices: fight it! Fight it with your every last breath! Or don’t, and accept the inevitability of fading away. But what about a third way or a fourth or a fifth or a 953rd? I know I’m saying this to a whole host of women who are already hellbent on creating those ways, because surely there as many ways of being, of feeling – of looking – 40, 50, 60, 90, 103 as there are women.
Until we do – because it clearly is up to us to create them for ourselves – is it any surprise I can hear Trinny’s Plump Up Peptide + HA Serum calling to me from the website basket where I left it…?
• Seriously, how are you feeling about all this? Are you doing better than me at eschewing the beauty standards society is still slinging our way? I’d love to know.
None of it works. NONE. I am 57 and have been using "products" for skin, hair and nails for more than 40 years. Nothing has ever delivered on any promise. I mean not one thing, and that is by design. The only thing that helps you look (and feel) better is what you put on the inside- nutritious food, copious water and better thoughts. Save your money. Buy a great book.
Horribly relatable. My own version is complicated by being queer (yay male beauty products! Where's our *ungendered* serums and creams, tho?) by having a faith life (aren't I meant to care more about my inner life and soul than my bloody face?) and by my concerns for environment and 'natural', meaning I sift for organic, no-plastic, cruelty free, nanotechnology-free blah blah blah. Feels like another part-time job when I'm running out of a discontinued eg sunscreen and need another. But hey! Anyone on this thread got a recommendation for a totally natural organic CC cream that doesn't turn you rosy pink? (I'm joking. No I'm not. I need that thing. Oh Jesus I am so superficial. I hate myself. But no, this is just grooming, not vanity. And on and on).