Aging: Face it!

I had a fun – and instructive – time last Friday participating in a real-time, online Q&A session about anti-aging strategies hosted by The Guardian newspaper and orchestrated by the unflappable Emma Keller.  It was a fast-paced, intense hour of back-and-forth with queries flying as fast as I could type reasonably informed answers (and correct almost but not quite all of my typos).  You can read the transcript here.

Actually, the questions came faster than I could reply, but Emma was a great curator, combiner and traffic cop.  She kept me apprised of what she was doing or going to do, what questions were coming next, when I should just click “post” and move on, all through ceaseless back channel communication (side chats on the site, an open phone line between us).  So much was happening at such a fast pace that I actually, literally, worked up a sweat.

What was most interesting about the entire experience (other than how strenuous it was) was how many of the questions focused on the aging face.  Before we even went live, Emma texted me that she was being deluged with questions about how to erase wrinkles and what the best face cream was and what to do about a sagging jawline and if estrogen cream improves skin texture and whether facial exercises were a good idea and what supplements to take to have younger skin and whether vegetarians might have special skin needs.

I wanted to write:  Hey, out there.  Staying youthful is about what is happening INSIDE.  The best anti-aging strategies are about how to keep your heart and lungs and arteries and muscles and brain in tip-top shape not how to smooth out your skin.  Ask me those kind of questions! But I didn’t – or at least not until later in the session. I began by dutifully answering the skin questions. That’s because I know that a significant percentage of the almost $100 billion American anti-aging industry is devoted to the face, from surgeries and muscle paralyzers to fillers and plumpers, from lasers and peels to supplements and salves, to $900 a pot face creams with scientific pedigrees and impossibly exotic ingredients.

The Daily Mail (perhaps not the most trustworthy source) reported recently that Jennifer Anniston spent about $2000 a month on her face, including a $450 ointment that (here’s where the “perhaps not the most trustworthy source” comes in) was made with crystals from Mars.  I so wish that were true.  It would be an awesome reason to increase NASA funding.  Leaf through any magazine devoted to women (and some that are devoted to men) and the first ten pages – more like 20 in some magazines – are face creams that promise incredible anti-aging results which you can plainly see on the studio-lit, airbrushed, poreless faces of the 25-year-old models staring out at you, doe-eyed.

So…my answer to those questions circling around “Does anything work?”  Yes. Staying out of the sun works.  Not smoking works.  Staying hydrated works.  Eating clean works.  Exercising works.  Can you erase wrinkles with surgery, fillers, plumpers?  Yes.  But you are NOT erasing age.  You are not turning back your biological clock.  That ticks from the inside.