Vanity, Thy Name Is Botox
Approaching 70 in a business dominated by and for the youth market, but lucky enough to be blessed with youthful genes, I find the absorption with looking young, being young, and acting young mildly amusing at best and absurd for the most part.
Youth, frequently derided as being too rich for the young and lost on the old, has benefits beyond imagining: taut skin, thick hair, alacrity upon waking, endless love-making, and speedy recovery from cuts, hangovers, illness and the many setbacks human life is heir to. The wish to hold on to youth has arrested the interest of poets and advertisers and people in general. It’s a wish as old as our self-absorbed species has trod the planet. The hope of being free of the desuetude that comes with one’s years will outlast us all. Our ridiculous attempts to stave off the workings of our DNA has always fostered the appearance of age-defying creams, potions, regimens, habits and practices designed to forfend the implacable onset of age, our body’s steady and natural decline, and our retreat into eternity and life among the stars from which we sprang. I saw this most clearly in a commercial for Botox cosmetics that presents an array of stunningly attractive people — all who seem no more than 35, younger or thereabouts — showcasing the results of therapy that made them appear more attractive and younger than their years. Why anyone would want to be younger than 35, unless they are a professional NFL running back, strikes me as the nadir of vanity. But hey, whatever floats your boat. Or poor self-esteem or terror of wrinkles.
By definition, certainly by what advertisers seek, I am beyond the demographic they cherish, which is why my age group mostly appears in pharmaceutical ads for conditions that beset boomers like myself. My kind, for example, simply don’t appear in car commercials — something that I find odd since boomers love cars, and in retirement many of them will treat themselves to that dream car. But I digress.
Boomers have dominated the economy for virtually their entire lives, and they ushered in the gushing attention given to youth. As they aged, they have sought to fend off its effects with some success. They have paid attention to their weight and eating habits a bit more than my parents’ generation, who as a group, kept smoking and eating and drinking like there was no tomorrow. Good for them, I suppose. I remember my father telling me that if I kept my smoking habit to a pack a day, I would be fine. I quit at 30. He never did and died of lung cancer at 80. But then he enjoyed smoking and eating and probably thought exercising was something for people with too much time on their hands. And he managed to add 10 years to the allotted three score and ten allotted to us in Psalm 90:9–11. All things considered, not a bad run.
And so that BOTOX commercial. Every person in it, so we are told, is an actual BOTOX patient. Although how we might think of these people as patients, that being people with conditions needing treatment for a medical condition, escapes me. We see in the onscreen text that “Results May Vary,” which I think means you might not be as incredibly attractive after treatment as the patients in the ad clearly are. But these patients are actors, people with a vested interest in looking young forever. Like Jane Fonda.
But what we don’t learn in the ad, but which we can take for granted, is that these patients need an arrestment of the aging process about as much as stars in the Milky Way need dimming.
