The $$$ fight against the march of time

There is no amount of money you can spend to age like J. Lo. I would love to be the type of person who is totally unafraid of aging and completely comfortable with the idea of my hair turning gray and getting more wrinkles under my eyes. I am also absolutely not that person. Instead, I’ve been using anti-wrinkle cream since I was a teenager, and at the beach, you can find me parked squarely under an umbrella and covered in the highest-SPF sunscreen I can find. I am aware that most anti-aging products are a sham, as is anti-aging culture overall. But I will fall for the whole thing until the day I die. That’s the topic of my latest column for Vox: [the ways the beauty industry preys on our insecurities around aging to get us to buy, buy, buy](. I, like a lot of people, love a good scam story. But what really gets me is how many scams are hiding in plain sight. That’s the topic of my Vox column and newsletter, [The Big Squeeze](. Every two weeks, I dive into how people are being squeezed by capitalism in ways big and small, legal and illegal. I’ve looked at [why we pay]( to be slightly less miserable at the airport, how Amazon just [invented Prime Day]( out of thin air, and [what a bad idea it is]( to listen to celebrities about money. Check out my latest installment of The Big Squeeze below, and if you like it, [I hope you’ll subscribe](. Also, I’m not kidding when I say I really do love a good scam story, so if you have one, or an idea for a future column, please reach out. Send me an email at emily.stewart@vox.com or find me on [Twitter](. —[Emily Stewart](, senior correspondent   How the anti-aging industry turns you into a customer for life [tiny dropper bottles on red background]( Iryna Veklich via Getty Images In late June, I sat in on a conversation featuring three models, all over the age of 50, about aging and beauty. “We need representation of spring, summer, fall, and winter,” one of the panelists, Swedish model Paulina Porizkova, declared. Model Yasmin Warsame spoke about how aging is treated as a sign of wisdom in her birth country of Somalia. The discussion’s moderator, Allure editor-in-chief Jessica Cruel, brought up the magazine’s much-publicized decision five years ago to ax the term “anti-aging” from its pages. “How are you going to be anti-living?” she asked. The takeaway of the panel, hosted by the Aspen Institute, was supposed to be that women should demand to be seen, regardless of how old they are, and that society needs to accept all versions of beauty, no matter someone’s birthdate. But some mild discomfort with the premise was evident. Christie Brinkley mentioned a specific wrinkle that bothers her multiple times and the steps she’s taken to minimize it. All of the panelists acknowledged at least the temptation to get some work done, and the conundrum that you’re “shamed if you do, shamed if you don’t,” as Porizkova put it. I left thinking it’s probably time to start looking into fillers. We’ve learned to pretend to celebrate older women, but we haven’t learned to accept what happens naturally to their skin. We celebrate older women but not the un-intervened-upon face. This fuels a multibillion-dollar cosmetic and skin care industry dedicated to helping people — mainly women — stay young, or rather, try to look like it. According to data from Euromonitor International, the anti-aging market grew from $3.9 billion in 2016 to $4.9 billion in 2021 in the United States alone. The global anti-aging market went from $25 billion to nearly $37 billion during the same period. [“Anti-aging is probably the most popular and lasting promise of any sort of skin care brand or injectable,”](said Jessica DeFino, a beauty writer and author of The Unpublishable, a newsletter focused on the darker sides of the beauty industry. “Youth is the ultimate goal, and obviously very convenient for the industry, because it’s an impossible goal.” Dermatologists say that a lot of this stuff is a scam anyway and doesn’t work. Many companies fail to back up their claims of reversing the forward march of time, and some products wind up irritating the skin and making it more vulnerable to the elements, not less. But even for the products that actually make a difference, whether it's a sunscreen to try to slow skin damage or retinol to try to reduce some wrinkles, there’s really a limited amount they can accomplish. Marketers know some consumers will spend a lot of money hoping they’ll do anything, and they’ll do so for years. The minute women hit their 20s (and in some cases, even younger), they’re told they’re in a race against time they’re destined to lose. And still, they’re encouraged to spend thousands of dollars to try to win. [Read the full story »]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   The pandemic impulse purchases we grew to hate From Pelotons to pets, the Covid buys people wish they’d left on the shelves. [Read the full story »](   The awful American consumer We want cheap stuff fast and don’t care who it hurts. [Read the full story »](   More good stuff to read today - [Stopping inflation is going to hurt]( - [Bully your rich friends into commissioning more art]( - [What GDP does and doesn't tell us]( - [Climate fixes are all aimed at property owners. What about renters?]( - [The best $180 I ever spent: My union fees]( - [Jordan Peele's Nope, explained]( [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=goods). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2022. All rights reserved.