Song of the Week: “Laughter Lines,” by Bastille - “I’ll see you in the future when we’re older / and we are full of stories to be told.”
When I was twelve years old, my cousin Kristii came to visit, and offered to style my hair with her curling iron. Halfway through, she started laughing. “What’s been stressing you out?” she asked. “You have a grey hair!”
“Pull it out!” I urged, and winced as she did. To my dismay, that first grey hair was an omen of things to come. Soon, every Friday night, I was making my mom peer at my head under a bright lamp and painstakingly pull out the one or two grey hairs that she spotted there each week.
By the time I was a freshman in university, I’d started box dyeing my hair every couple of months to keep the greys covered. I’d rope a friend into helping and we’d spend hours in our dorm’s laundry room, watching Disney movies on my laptop and breathing in harsh fumes as we turned my hair chestnut or black or burgundy: anything to hide its natural color. Still, I was always in a race against time, and against my own body. “Wow,” my tall classmate Erik would snark if he was standing close to me and could see the top of my head. “Your roots are so grey!”
By the time I was in my PhD program, I wasn’t satisfied with the flat color and damage the box dyes inflicted, and I was budgeting my modest grad student salary to dye my hair professionally. It was over $200 US every time.
It was my husband Taylor who finally convinced me to stop. “I think the silver is cool,” he said, again and again. So I dyed it one last time - to have long, deep brown “princess hair” for my wedding - and then I stopped. Three days after the wedding I got a pixie cut, and I committed to stop dyeing my hair.
It was rough, at first. There was a harsh line between the dyed and undyed sections that made me feel sloppy and ugly. And I was shocked to see that, concealed over the decade by frequent dyeing, more than half of my hair was grey now!
But gradually, things evened out. I followed Instagram accounts that spotlighted grey-haired women of all ages, and I kept an eye out for stylish women in the real world who had hair like mine. I started getting compliments on my hair: from older women with dyed hair who were wistful and admiring, but also from young baristas and cashiers and teenagers who thought it was cool.
Of course, if I was a man, I doubt I would have needed such reassurance. George Clooney, after all, is a “silver fox,” not a “tired old hag.” But who knows? It feels like our cultural anxiety around grey hair, and beauty, and the underlying fear of aging that comes with it, is only intensifying.
Yesterday I saw an advertisement for Just for Men, a men’s box dye that promises to banish grey roots. In the ad, a young man spots grey in his sideburns and then screams so loudly that his anguish can be heard from space. One application of grey-concealing dye later, however, and he’s walking confidently down the sidewalk, glowing with youth and vitality.
The message could not be clearer: if you have grey hair, you are old. And if you are old, you lose your value.
Wrinkle Free
I was 28 when I stopped dyeing my hair, and it forced me to confront my own prejudices and anxieties about aging. Would people think I was tired, incompetent, not worth paying attention to or listening to? Would anyone find me attractive? Would I suffer in job interviews or social settings because I refused to do the labor necessary to look how I was “supposed” to look at 28? Would I become invisible?1
We live in a culture that is obsessed with youth, health, and beauty. This is nothing new. Consider, for example, Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”:
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To morrow will be dying.
The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he's a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
And neerer he's to Setting.
That Age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.In other words: “Hey girl, you should have sex with me right now, because soon you’ll be old and no one will want you.”
Herrick’s language may be antiquated, but his message is still ubiquitous today. Just look at the alarming rise of “preventative Botox” and other invasive “anti-aging” treatments being marketed to women in their twenties and even teens.
“Anti-aging is probably the most popular and lasting promise of any sort of skin care brand or injectable,” says Jessica DeFino, who writes the amazing Substack The Review of Beauty. “Youth is the ultimate goal, and obviously very convenient for the industry, because it’s an impossible goal.”
But that won’t stop consumers from trying.
Between 2016 and 2021, the global anti-aging market went from being worth $25 billion to being worth $37 billion. By the beginning of the next decade, experts predict it will be worth over $80 billion. Individual Botox treatments can cost $300-400, and once users start, it’s psychologically difficult for them to stop. Regardless of whether someone starts Botox at 25 or 50, as soon as they cease treatment their facial mobility will begin to return, and wrinkles will inevitably form - often exacerbated by muscles that have been weakened by years of treatments. Ultimately, your Botox-free face “looks ugly to you,” explains sociologist Dr. Dana Berkowitz, author of Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America. “This wrinkle-free, ageless face becomes totally normalized. We expect it and then we view that as beautiful.”
Then there are the less invasive, but no less expensive, treatments: red light masks that make the user look like a glowing Hannibal Lecter; facials and chemical peels; pricey creams and tonics filled with harsh chemicals and questionable extracts. Beauty retailer Sephora made headlines last year because of the glut of girls as young as 8 who are trying to buy anti-aging products and assemble multi-step skincare routines. Driven by technology that encourages them to hyperfixate on their appearance, and TikTok influencers who make expensive and well-designed products look glamorous, little kids are begging for anti-aging products before they’ve even reached puberty.2
Certain brands such as the colorful and playfully-designed Drunk Elephant are particularly culpable. As Natalie Stechyson writes for CBC, in a 2023 social media post the brand “offered up a list of product recommendations for children, including a $92 bottle of Virgin Marula Luxury Face Oil. The product says it treats issues like fine lines and uneven texture. ‘None of this is appropriate for children,’ a user wrote in the comments, one of many.”
Underlying all of these critiques of preventative Botox and tween Sephora visits, however, is the implicit assumption that anti-aging products are still valuable and normal for “women of a certain age.” Women, they imply, should fear aging above all else.3
And to a certain extent, they’re right. In a society that values women for beauty and fertility above all else, women often make calculated choices to maintain power and control for as long as possible. I critique the beauty industry from a place of privilege: I work in academia, where credentials and experience are far more important than physical appearance.4 When I see actresses and musicians undergo invasive cosmetic procedures, I’m sympathetic: I can’t imagine how psychologically destructive it is to live your life in the spotlight and have an entire industry dedicated to scrutinizing and mocking your appearance every day of your life.
But I think we make a fundamental mistake if we rebrand anti-aging procedures as “self-care” or “empowerment.”
As DeFino writes in a 2021 Substack post:
Looking more youthful might ‘empower’ the person who gets Botox/filler/face lifts - “empower” as in, grants them the literal power to prevail in a society where “beautiful” women statistically see more professional, personal, and financial success and beauty is defined, in part, as youth - but it does not empower people as a whole. It disempowers the collective by continuing to perpetuate unrealistic and unachievable standards.
Take, for example, Martha Stewart’s 2023 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover.
At age 81, Stewart is the oldest woman to appear on the cover in history. “I was motivated,” she says, “by showing people that a woman my age can still look good, feel good, be good…I don’t think about age very much, but I thought that this is kind of historic - and that I better look really good. I want other women…to feel that they could also be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.”
May we all dream so big.
In a media appearance on Today later that month, Stewart claimed her Sports Illustrated cover was “a testament to good living,” and “not about aging. The whole aging thing is so boring.”
Other interviews, however, told a different story. “I didn’t starve myself, but I didn’t eat any bread or pasta for a couple of months,” Stewart told People magazine. She went to Pilates every other day, did an intensive skincare regime, and tried on an “exhausting” number of bathing suits. And then, of course, there are the decades of unacknowledged beauty treatments and procedures: the hair color, injections, and plastic surgery required to keep her tight in some places and round in others.
Eighty-one years old. Is that what I am meant to look forward to in the twilight of my life? Sacrificing carbs just so that I can have the honor of remaining forever a sex object?
The Last Acceptable Prejudice
Ageism - discrimination and stereotyping against people because they are older - remains one of the last acceptable prejudices. From birthday card jokes to casual assumptions that elderly people are incompetent, bigoted, or expendable, we say things about our elders that we would never accept about any other group. Reflecting on early pandemic dismissals of the elderly as acceptable victims of Covid-19, Rabbi Shai Held writes:
Notice how the all-too-familiar rhetoric of dehumanization works: ‘The elderly’ are bunched together as a faceless mass, all of them considered culprits and thus effectively deserving of the suffering the pandemic will inflict upon them. Lost entirely is the fact that the elderly are individual human beings, each with a distinctive face and voice, each with hopes and dreams, memories and regrets, friendship and marriages, loves lost and loves sustained. But they deserve to die - and as for us, we can just go about our business…
What does it say about our society that people think of the elderly so dismissively - and moreover, that they feel no shame about expressing such thoughts publicly? I find myself wondering whether this colossal moral failure is exacerbated by the most troubled parts of our cultural and economic life. When people are measured and valued by their economic productivity, it is easy to treat people whose most economically productive days have passed as, well, worthless.
Ageism is also, unsurprisingly, intertwined with ableism. Many of the hallmarks of old age - wheelchairs, hearing aids, blindness - are also markers of disability that affect people of many different ages. Able-bodied people fear growing old in part because we recognize how begrudgingly and inadequately society accommodates people with disabilities. That being said, elderly folks - whether they have a particular disability or not - are often treated like a lost cause in a way that their younger disabled counterparts are not.
As Catalina Devandas-Aguilar wrote for the UN in 2019, “while disability is increasingly understood as a social construct, inequalities due to old age are predominantly seen as ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable,’ [leading to] older persons with disabilities [being] discriminated against and disadvantaged not just because they have a disability, but also because of stereotypes about older people.”
These stereotypes are so prevalent and enduring that they have spawned an entire genre of narrative about senior citizens solving - or committing! - crimes. There’s Agatha Christie’s famous Miss Marple, of course, who wanders into crime scenes and interrogates suspects without attracting attention. My book club recently read Helene Tursten’s darkly comic An Elderly Woman is Up to No Good, about an 88-year-old Swedish woman who murders people who annoy her and gets away with it because everyone assumes she’s a harmless old lady.
And I love Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, about a quartet of British retirees who solve murders in part because they are consistently underestimated by everyone around them.5 The Thursday Murder Club books are tightly plotted, and warm, and extremely funny, and they depict their protagonists as distinct and three-dimensional characters.
They do not, however, romanticize aging. Characters struggle with the grief of widowhood, frustrations over chronic pain and the loss of ability, and the societal dismissal that comes with age. Most poignantly, Osman unflinching depicts the horror of watching friends, spouses, or even one’s own self gradually destroyed by dementia.
Of all the things to lose, to lose one’s mind? Let them take a leg or a lung; let them take anything before they take that. Before you become “poor Rosemary” or “poor Frank,” catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they were. Before there were no more trips, no more games, no more Murder Clubs. Before there was no more you.”
Beyond the wrinkles, and the grey hair, and the life outside of the spotlight of beauty and youth, here is the real thing to fear about aging: mortality. The end of memory. The total annihilation of the self.
Models
My favorite recent TV show is Mike Schur’s A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson as retired architect Charles Nieuwendyk. Charles has experienced the loss that we all dread: he has watched his beloved wife slowly succumb to Alzheimer’s, and in the wake of her death he withdraws from the world. He hides her clothes and paintings in storage, keeps to a strict routine, and mails his busy daughter newspaper articles about bridges instead of talking with her about their shared grief.
Much like The Thursday Murder Club, Man on the Inside does not shy away from the precarity and loss that inevitably accompanies aging. Children are distant and dismissive. Illnesses are frequent and debilitating. Friends die: some suddenly, some gradually slipping away. In one poignant scene, Charles recites a monologue from As You Like It at a friend’s memorial:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (Act II, scene vii)Despite this grim pronouncement, however, Charles realizes that he is not at the end yet.
When he gets a job working for a private investigator and infiltrates a senior living home, he finds joy and purpose in community. He makes friends, takes painting classes, and discovers a new appreciation for Shakespeare that provides him with the words to honor his friend. He reconnects with his daughter and starts teaching the occasional architecture class. In short, he flourishes.
“The message is kind of, ‘no, don’t die until you die,’ you know?” says Danson in an interview with Deadline Hollywood. “Just keep inspiring people by staying out there in the world…you still have something to contribute.”
We make a crucial mistake when we turn our backs on the elderly, when we dread aging above all else. Not only because in doing so we deny their humanity and degrade ours, but because they have so much to share. They are memory keepers and guardians of wisdom, people who have insight into how to live honestly and vibrantly in the face of uncertainty and change.
I think of the magnificent Iris Apfel, whose quirky and colorful style had nothing to do with looking perpetually 25. I think of Civil Rights icons like John Lewis, who demonstrated what it looks like to spend a lifetime in the relentless and unyielding pursuit of justice. I think of the folks I volunteer with, who have spent decades sponsoring refugee families and advocating for LGBTQ+ people and feeding the hungry simply because they believe it is the right thing to do.
I think of that famous World War I poem that romanticizes the youthful dead, saying “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.” As if there is anything good about having your life cut short at 18.
I think of my classmate who was killed in a car accident at 24. Of my aunt who died of cancer and didn’t get to meet her grandsons. Of the writer Rachel Held Evans, who died suddenly at the age of 37 and left behind two kids under the age of five.
It’s such a privilege to grow old.
If I live to be 81, I hope my body is covered in tattoos and scars and stretch marks, the skin so thin as to become transparent in some places and sagging in others. I hope I wear bright lipstick, and big earrings, and funky glasses, just like I do now. I hope I never forgo the pleasures of a shatteringly crisp croissant, or a glass of wine in the sunshine, or a swim in warm water regardless of how I look in a bathing suit. And most of all, I hope that I’m still holding Taylor’s hand, still lingering late at tables surrounded by friends, the jokes we’ve told and the adventures we’ve shared etched permanently on our faces.
I should be so lucky.
When it comes to aging, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
As is so often the case, I was more concerned with the opinions of imaginary strangers than the affirmations of the people closest to me, who universally liked my new hair.
As a dermatologist notes in that article, the best thing people of all ages can do to maintain the health of their skin is to wear sunscreen.
And more recently, men too! In 2022, 33-year-old Joe Jonas became the spokesman for Botox alternative Xeomin. Feminism win?
As evidenced by the many Math professors who make innovations and win major awards while perpetually looking like they just got back from a three-day camping trip, dirty cargo shorts and all.
And they also, blessedly, have a much more positive attitude towards carbs. “Why diet at eighty-two?” asks Joyce in The Man Who Died Twice. “What’s a sausage roll going to do? Kill you? Well, join the queue.”
Another great read. Good perspective for me as I approach a significant birthday. And I also love “A Man on the Inside”
Poignantly beautiful and true. Thank you! So much wisdom here.