Beautiful Mature Skin Naturally? No Weird Old Trick required!

The advertisements for anti-wrinkle treatments that are popping up beside Triond articles keep catching my eye.

Society’s obsession with the quest for eternal youth stems from a biological desire to remain attractive to the opposite sex for fertility reasons. The media plays on our insecurities about ageing to sell us expensive products and sign us up for expensive cosmetic procedures. Old age in women is a bit of a taboo subject. Wrinkles, grey hair…God who still wants to take their photograph or have sex with them? Males in their later years go after the fast bikes and fertile young girls while the older females often become sexually disinterested and thus rejected. This is the cause for much conflict and it is neither party’s fault. Our bodies respond to our biology. A woman has her reproductive years and yet a man can go on producing sperm until he dies.

Men are like fine wines, they often improve with age. A well-established older man can attract a beautiful young female, even a not-so-well-off middle aged man can get a pretty youngster who is looking for a father figure or aspires to becoming a trophy girlfriend. However, the word ‘Cougar’ still makes us giggle and slightly cringe. People might go ‘phoar’ when they see an older man with a pretty young thing, other men will be envious, women curious, but when it comes to the older woman i.e. Madonna and her toyboy people consider that things are not right.

Older ladies get bad press. Somebody posed for the ‘before’ photograph in the anti-wrinkle advert. I mean, if somebody asked me to model ‘wrinkly 57 year old’ I’d punch them in the chops! Even worse, the woman used in the ‘after’ part of the advertisement isn’t even the same woman. She’s twenty five! It does make me wonder who falls for these ads and buys the products. Surely nobody believes that they can turn back the clock that far. No. The adverts operate on our subconscious on a deeper level, simply ‘wrinkles =shame.’

If we look at fairy tales woman are either youthful, virginal, desirable or witches and ugly sisters. There is no in between.

I have talked about the biological attraction of youth but do you choose to see the trickery and manipulation behind the anti-wrinkle, anti-ageing, anti-anything old incentive? I have chosen some photographs of older women around the world.