Why "anti-aging" is selling you a story, what it's actually rooted in, and what taking care of your skin across a lifetime really looks like.
You know what a laugh line is? It's a receipt. Proof that something happened worth laughing about. That you were there, present, feeling it. The beauty industry calls them a problem to be solved. I call that a very specific kind of audacity.
"Anti-aging" is a marketing category currently worth somewhere between $63 and $80 billion globally, depending on who you ask. ¹ It tells you a precise story: that your face at 25 is the goal, that everything after is a departure from that goal, and that the right products can fight, reverse, or prevent the evidence of a life lived on your face. It is, to put it plainly, selling you a war against yourself. And it has been doing this for a very long time.
In 1914, Harper's Bazaar ran the first beauty advertisement telling women that underarm hair was an embarrassing personal problem. ² A year later, Gillette launched the Milady Décolleté, the first razor marketed specifically to women, in a full-page ad in the July 1915 issue of the same magazine. ³ They didn't even use the word "shaving." They called it "smoothing." Within a decade, a thing that was simply a part of the human body had been repackaged as a flaw, and the industry that created that flaw was selling the solution.
This is the playbook. Create the insecurity. Sell the fix. Repeat.
The wrinkle conversation runs on the same logic. Aging skin is not defective skin. It is skin that has been somewhere. It has been in the sun and the wind. It has scrunched up with laughter and stretched with crying and tensed with concentration. The lines that result are not failures of maintenance. They are the record.
In 1972, Susan Sontag wrote an essay called "The Double Standard of Aging" for The Saturday Review. ⁴ She argued that men were permitted to age — that grey hair and lines read as distinguished and interesting — while women were expected to resist aging entirely or face a particular kind of social erasure. More than fifty years later, the anti-aging industry has not proven her wrong. It has simply gotten more expensive.
There is a reason for that erasure, and it goes further back than Harper's Bazaar. Over centuries, as patriarchal social structures solidified, the image of the older woman became something to fear or dismiss. The words the culture reached for were witch, crone, hag. Historian Alison Rowlands has argued that the construction of the "hag" archetype was informed by a fear of older women who were no longer fertile, no longer reproductive, no longer legible in the way patriarchal culture needed women to be legible. ⁵ The post-menopausal woman, in folklore and in cultural imagination, became dangerous. Or invisible. Or both.
The anti-aging industry is the modern version of the same message: stay young, or become irrelevant.
(I am aware that this is a skincare blog and I've just gone full feminist historiography. I am not sorry.)
Here is what gets lost in all of it: your skin is not a backdrop for your face. It is your largest organ. ⁶ It regulates your temperature, protects you from pathogens, manages hydration, signals pain and pressure. It is, in the most literal sense, the thing holding you together. When we talk about skin health, we should probably start there. Not "how do we make it look younger?" but "how do we keep it strong, resilient, and capable across a lifetime?"
Strong skin has a functioning barrier — the outermost layer that keeps moisture in and the things that shouldn't get in, out. When your barrier is healthy, your skin does its job without drama. It doesn't dry out, it doesn't flare, it doesn't overreact. The things that damage the barrier? Harsh cleansers. Over-exfoliation. A ten-step routine that strips your skin of everything it was trying to do. The "anti-aging" aisle, ironically, is full of them. ⁷
What supports the barrier? Gentle cleansing. Oils that work with your skin's own lipids rather than against them. Simple, consistent care that lets your skin do what it already knows how to do.
Pro-aging is not giving up. It is not doing nothing. It is choosing to support what your skin is already trying to do, instead of declaring war on it. It means products that work with your barrier rather than stripping it. It means not spending your mornings in a fight with your reflection. It means understanding that texture and lines are not evidence of something gone wrong. They are the evidence of a face that has been lived in. Fully. On purpose.
At Alaglow, we make two products. That is deliberate. Not because we couldn't think of more, but because we believe most people's skin doesn't need ten solutions. It needs two good ones, used consistently, by a brain that has other things to think about. The Everything Oil and the Serum Bar were designed to work with your barrier: to cleanse without stripping, to nourish without clogging, to make your skin feel taken care of without requiring a second job. That works at 25. It works at 55. The skin changes, but the approach holds.
Your laugh lines are receipts. They mean something happened worth laughing about. Your forehead lines are receipts. The lines around your eyes are receipts. Take care of the skin they live in, gently and consistently, the way you'd take care of anything you actually wanted to keep. But do not mistake caring for your skin with being ashamed of what it shows.
You earned every one of them.
Sources
¹ Grand View Research, Anti-Aging Products Market Size & Industry Report, 2025
² Hansen, H., Hair or Bare? The History of American Women and Hair Removal, 1914–1934, Barnard College, 2007
³ Harper's Bazaar, July 1915; documented in Rebecca Herzig, Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, University of Chicago Press, 2015
⁴ Susan Sontag, "The Double Standard of Aging," The Saturday Review, September 23, 1972
⁵ Alison Rowlands, referenced in Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, 2023
⁶ Standard dermatological classification; skin as largest organ by surface area, American Academy of Dermatology
⁷ Transepidermal water loss (TEWL) and skin barrier function research, Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
---That's the complete package: draft, no edits needed, image guide for 4 shots, and the full final article with citations. Want me to save this as a Word doc, or move on to 7A NC or 7B RC next?