In this world of today, people are spending so much money on looks since they want to look young. Why is this happening? Do you see this as a good development on considering some things? Or, is it such a bad news?
In this world of today, people are spending so much money on looks since they want to look young. Why is this happening? Do you see this as a good development on considering some things? Or, is it such a bad news?
Today, the fear of ageing — manifesting in spending on cosmetics, skincare and cosmetic procedures (as well as fashion) as well as anti-ageing treatments — represents one of the largest and fasted growing consumer markets in the world is a confluence of social, psychological, economic and cultural forces whose interaction has generated a phenomenon that is highly complex. I mainly see this as more negative than positive for society, though there are some aspects of it that ought not be so easily condemned.
A number of reinforcing drivers account for the strong, upward trajectory in youthful upkeep spending. Ageism – the systematic and social devaluation of older people, and the cultural identification of youth with desirability, competence, and social worth which characterises many contemporary societies — is arguably most salient. In social contexts in which ageing is experienced as a downgrading — in work settings that favour younger applicants, in romantic and social environments in which youth is overvalued and older people are either underrepresented or negatively stereotyped by media — opting for whatever means exist to conceal visible clues of natural processes such as ageing makes psychological sense and economic subsistence. The appearance industry has been remarkably successful at tapping into this cultural anxiety and profiting from it, producing marketing that both reflects and reinforces the feelings of inadequacy upon which its business model relies.
An additional very strong driver of this phenomenon has been the explosion in social media platforms. The normalisation of filtered, professionally lit and digitally enhanced self-presentation on the platforms traversed by hundreds of millions of people every day creates a previously unencountered intensity of visual comparison in which unmediated natural appearance — including the natural appearance of ageing — can seem woefully unsuccessful when contrasted with the hyper-reality that surrounds it. In this new visual landscape, where beauty filters automatically smooth skin, supply a reluctance to show apparent age and modify proportions to give the impression of perfect facial symmetry, our understanding of what a natural human face is has shifted to become ever harder to realise, producing appearance anxieties in lookers that the beauty and cosmetic industry is primed and ready suppress.
Economic factors also contribute. In cultures where career advancement, social status and partner attractiveness are strongly correlated with looks — and where age discrimination while technically outlawed in many environments is nevertheless a driving force behind hiring, promotion and dating choices — investing into looking young could produce what are not entirely unreasonable private instrumental returns. The age of experience is not a theory, but an established fact: academia offers an enormous body of research on age discrimination — particularly amongst professional women — and the tangible effects that a much older-looking face has in fields where youth is systematically preferred.
The adverse effects of this trend work at both the individual and societal level. At an individual level, the financial cost of maintaining appearance expenditure — especially for those on lower incomes who are targeted by the same cultural expectations as wealthier individuals but with virtually none of their means to keep up — can be extremely taxing financially compared to any real benefits it brings. Even more concerning are the psychological impacts — using data available up to October 2023, research suggests countries with stricter norms of youth-appearance have higher levels of self-reported body dissatisfaction, appearance-related anxiety, and lower self-esteem among an ageing population (more so in women) requiring solving a truly large-scale mental health burden.
At a societal level ageism expressed through the cultural equation of worth with youthful appearance literally hurts millions more older people than just from the appearance dimension itself — devaluation of experience, wisdom and contribution to social and economic life in ways that amount to an enormous loss of human potential. It also legitimatizes a fundamentally unfair relationship with natural age — treating evidence of life lived as something to erase rather than an entirely normal, dignified expression of the human condition.
Some might contend that individual choice in how one presents, at least in terms of appearance, is a good thing — that individuals should be free to spend their money as they choose and that investing in one’s appearance can often yield real psychological dividends including an increase in confidence and improved professional or interpersonal outcomes that make the investment worthwhile. I do not dismiss this argument but contend that it meets the primary issue head-on and only at a symptomatic level — the answer to ageism is not investing money into individual bests of ageism mitigation, but rather what we need is transformation of epoch itself which has at its goal freeing all people from the devaluation that befalls ageing.
In conclusion, these staggering increases in spending on appearance focused on preservation of youth is symptomatic of a fundamental cultural ageism supported by the amplifier of social media and driven economically by marketing forces that render this trend chiefly pernicious both socially and psychologically. It that can be meaningfully addressed will involve a cultural challenge to ageist conventions rather than submission to them by individuals.