By Dani Bigham | Reporter
TikTok has many trends that live briefly and are gone or overused by the end of the week. However, anti-aging seems like one that we just can’t shake. While Americans have been obsessed with youthfulness for a long time, it feels like it’s become far more pervasive than ever before. New rules and tools keep popping up out of nowhere.
- Don’t drink from a straw. You’ll get wrinkles by pursing your lips.
- Try a mask with red light that supposedly helps reduce wrinkles, with the added bonus of resembling a bougie version of Michael Myers.
- Tape your face when you sleep.
- Spend hundreds of dollars on a skin care routine.
- Get preventative Botox.
- Don’t make too many facial expressions. You’ll get lines.
- Sit in front of the mirror and practice conversations where you run the full emotional gamut without raising your eyebrows.
- Learn how to chew upward, which will strengthen the muscles in your cheeks and give you a more heart-shaped face.
- Sleep while levitating in the air, so you have no wrinkles anywhere.
- Spin around while chanting, “My skin is glass, and it will never crack.”
Kidding on those last few, but barely.
Aging is a natural process — one that will happen to us all. It means that we’ve lived a full life, experiencing the highs and lows that come with it. Scars that tell either really silly or super cool stories. Smile lines that show we’ve enjoyed the time we have had. Aging is inevitable, but some spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to prevent it. Why do we still try to preserve something that we know is so fleeting?
While men do have their own near-impossible beauty standards — with six-packs and chiseled jawlines — they have historically had more opportunities than women to advance in society. The only thing women had for a while was their beauty. Being attractive meant they could find men with decent jobs and be taken care of.
With the advent of social media, these standards have gotten higher than ever, and I think the pressure has gotten to us. We shouldn’t be afraid to just exist without worrying about how we’ll look in the future.
Thankfully, there seems to be pushback, as I’ve also seen many videos of people scrunching their faces, grinning ear to ear and making every expression under the sun in response to the anti-aging trend, ironically listed as “anti-anti-aging.”
Personally, I’m glad that I’ll look like a wrinkly prune, as it means I’ll get to be old. I’ll have the chance to travel, see as many sunsets as possible and have tons of stories to tell. And my body will show them, and that’s OK.
