Age and Beauty

In a very interesting Washington Post article that claims we are hard wired in our perception of beauty, David Von Drehle concludes with an epilogue about age.

"Our era is sexually candid but chronologically dishonest. A recent ad for anti-wrinkle cream in a major fashion magazine employed a model who appeared to be in her teens. Countless ads for men's underwear feature slim bodies, taut as a Renaissance Saint Sebastian. The skivvies, bulging like a one-pound bag toting a two-pound puppy, shout all man. But the inevitably hairless bodies whisper still boy. The most widely circulated magazine in the country is published by the AARP; its standard cover image is a movie star or other celebrity who has managed, with the help of a stylist and modern technology, to look 20 years younger than the truth.

If today's Americans are uniquely obsessed, it's not with beauty, but with youth. The aging baby boomers who have shaped so much popular culture for such a dreadfully long time are now pondering age spots, varicose veins, worry lines and droopy breasts. Vogue's August effort was titled "The Age Issue," but it could have been called "The Fear of Age Issue." Along with the article on cosmetic surgery for feet, ("I will always feel young as long as I can wear heels"), the magazine promoted human growth hormone for "an ageless body," detailed the merits of vascular surgery for younger-looking legs ("the bruises have faded almost completely within two weeks") and explained why a 48-year-old woman decided to get braces on her teeth -- for the second time.

"How sad it is!" lamented the handsome young Dorian Gray. "I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day in June." As Oscar Wilde knew, an aging person's obsession with looking young has less to do with beauty than with the realization that beauty dies.

Time waits for no one, no matter how many sets of braces one wears. The struggle to preserve the physical bloom, whether through single-minded obsession or through artifice, is a fight that can never be won, for human beings are made of flesh, not stone."