Everything Is Content - Ageing - a deep dive

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

Today we’ll be taking a deep dive into the fountain of youth for our second beauty special - and this time we’re talking about ageing. Has looking become replaced being skinny as the toxic beauty standard of today? Join Beth, Ruchira and Oenone as we discuss some of the gorgeous women who have chosen to age visibly in the public eye, how anti-ageing pressure can impact men as well as women and how the pressure to look young has trickled down to primary school age children. If you have anything you’d like to add to the conversion - you can get in touch with us on Instagram @everythingiscontentpod. We’d love to hear from you. Last week we did a special deep dive into makeovers - so get yourself back over there to listen to that if you haven’t heard it yet! —THE GUARDIAN: A quick reminder ... The Beauty MythNEW YORK TIMES: The Art Of BotoxNEW YORK TIMES: Straws That Don’t Cause Wrinkles. Wait — Straws Cause Wrinkles?THE TELEGRAPH: ‘Anti-wrinkle straws’ beloved by Gen Z slated by skin expertsTHE GUARDIAN: ‘My ultimate goal? Don’t die’: Bryan Johnson on his controversial plan to live for everEVENING STANDARD: #TheFaceof10: new campaign launches to protect young girls from damaging anti-ageing skincare contentTHE GUARDIAN: Swedish pharmacy bans sale of anti-ageing skincare to childrenTHE CUT: TikTok Is Taking Over My Teen’s Multistep Skin-Care Routine—Follow us on Instagram:@everythingiscontentpod @beth_mccoll @ruchira_sharma@oenone ---Everything Is Content is produced by Faye Lawrence for We Are GrapeExec Producer: James Norman-FyfeMusic: James RichardsonPhotography: Rebecca Need-Meenar Artwork: Joe Gardner  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You are listening to Everything Is Podcast. Sorry, hang on. Okay. Your Honour, I'm going to do that one again. I'm Beth. I'm Richera. I'm Anoni. You are listening to Everything Is Content, our pop culture podcast. We get together every week because we can't get enough of

everything to do with pop culture and we want to chat to you about it with a serum in your pop culture skincare routine last week on the podcast we did a deep dive into the world of makeovers we discussed some of cinema's most iconic makeovers and the noughties hellscape of makeover tv shows and then how makeover culture is manifesting in today's internet landscape. So go back and give that episode a listen if you haven't already. We got very fired up. Today is the second of our beauty specials, and we're going to be diving further into a topic that, as three women roughly dancing around the age of 30, is very close to our

hearts. I want to say something funny where I can think, aging, aging, which of you? Aging. Aging. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. And if you have anything you want to add to the conversation, chat to us on Instagram at everythingiscontentpod. So last week on the podcast,

we touched on makeovers and tweakments and how it can feel like we're all one beauty treatment away from having our magic makeover moment like anne hathaway does in the princess diaries and finally achieving our ugly duckling to swan pipeline and we spoke about the pressure that society puts on us to conform to western beauty standards but another major impossible standard that we're held to is looking young and as all of us are 30 soon to be 31 or coming up to 30 where are you guys at with aging do you feel a pressure to look young or are you just you know going with the flow i'm kind of tempted as the oldest member of the pod squad oh hideous I'll never say that again um to be like the my feelings are the most valid here but actually I think so I'm almost

31 I feel more relaxed about aging than I did when I was 29 so I'm almost more interested to hear from Ruchira about kind of how you feel positioned before 30 which I think people consider that like first real aging hump so spotlight on Ruchira thanks Beth yeah I think I have a really bizarre point of view on this which is I've always looked really young for most of my life so I have a complete reverse approach on it where I've always wanted to age myself up for as long as I can remember I have all of these insecurities about not being taken seriously in the workplace people you know undermining my experience because they just do a face value impression of me and assume that I'm 10 years junior or whatever I don't I do worry

about aging but it's the opposite thing where I'm kind of like oh I'd love a few crow's feet or like a little bit of wear and tear on my face. So it's not your average fear of aging. It's the opposite, I'd say. Okay, humble brag. No, don't do this to me. I'm joking, I'm joking. I show aging.

My face, like I can't even begin to guess my own face. Like age-wise, I would not ask anyone as well because it would hurt my feelings. But I definitely have like signs of aging and it does happen it feels like you've never looked in the mirror and then at kind of 30 plus you look and you go well that wasn't there yesterday so I've I've got visible signs of aging because of course I'm 31 it'd be quite weird if I didn't and I've also done like I'm kind of in the skincare world I'm not obsessive with it and I've also had the tweakments I've had Botox and I've had a lip flip which we're obsessed with the lip flips we were so influenced when you had that done yeah but do you remember when we just started doing the podcast and I had the lip flip and it was too severe and I I basically gave myself um a lisp

so wait lip flip for anyone who doesn't know is botox in the top lip to prevent the kind of lower lip from tucking under so you just have a fuller look and i got quite an extreme one just as we were launching this podcast and i was like guys i can't speak when i would do my teeth and would do the mouthwash i had to manually close my mouth i don't pinch my mouth part like a ravioli so i i'm quite open about what i've had done and I don't you know it's Botox twice a year and it was that never again so like I do feel like I'm so aware of aging and I'm taking I'm doing anti-aging stuff so I'm in it whether I feel like I'm bothered or not I'm in it I completely agree with you Beth what you said earlier about how once you get to 30 it

almost it lessens because I did Botox my sister did Botox on me maybe I was 29 or 28 and then I kind of let it wear off and I was so worried because I think in your head you're like oh my god when I get to 30 I'm gonna look drastically different obviously like the 24 hours between being 29 and 30 you look exactly the same and then when you arrive you're like oh okay I actually it's not it's almost like you're so prepared to wake up one day and just that haggard that actually it's quite a really I'm now like oh okay I actually it's not it's almost like you're so prepared to wake up one day and just that haggard that actually it's quite a really I'm now like oh it's fine and even on the like visible signs of aging thing I actually think what it is is like most of my friends don't really have

like like yeah we're like they have a couple of wrinkles whatever it's not even that it's just there's something about people's faces and you can just you know how old someone is and I know you're saying whichever people would look at you and you do look younger but then there's also this other side of things where like someone could have the most unwrinkled skin and you'd still know you kind of could guess you know that they're like 25 as opposed to 15 even though their skin looks a certain way so there's like something about the ability to maintain the ability to be on top of you know keeping a certain look well I guess with aging it's like it's happening whether we like it or not it's kind of like a train that's going to end up at a destination and what people are trying to do is like slow it down as much as possible so there is no way to literally look like you did at 15.

You can't reverse it. But all of these things, I guess, in people's minds are like trying to hit the pause button rather than like stop it completely. That idea, Richa, that aging is happening, whether or not we like it is such an important thing to think about because it's such a blessing to get older and to age. And the fact that we're all like kind of terrified of it and trying to hit pause is weird because I do think that things do get better as you get older you know yourself more you kind of understand your sense of style you might have a bit more money hopefully if you've like worked up in your career there's things to be said for having had lived a life and been experienced and it's so warped that we're so desperate to kind of like gain in every other area but age is the one place

where we're like no you must not know my age so we asked you on instagram what you were feeling about the pressure of aging and we had a few comments in the first message we had was i feel like the beauty industry is working so hard to keep me poor I'm resisting I can't be asked if I dyed my gray hairs I'd be hundreds of pounds out of pocket each year I can't do it which I think is a really valuable and I think we spoke about it last time but it is such a valuable angle of like forget about insecurities forget about keeping up appearances especially in a time when we're living through the cost of living crisis like it is just actually unaffordable to do the level of things that maybe we aspire to do have you tapered off any beauty treatments since this sort of like financial crisis we're going through or have you

is that one thing that sort of you tend to prioritize I haven't got a haircut for ages and I'm definitely overdue and yeah I keep putting it off because of that, because they're just so expensive. And I'm also really bitter about somebody chopping a straight line in my hair and that costing like £70. I just, yeah. So I'm just putting that off and I kind of think I might have a go myself there's a real premium on female beauty so like these things do cost money I budget for them and even when I budget for them like it's not necessarily going to be good so I do think there's like I have a lot of resentment for how much money I spend and I intentionally don't look at how much money I spend and spent because I know it would make me feel furious I don't know at who myself the patriarchy um it's so expensive to kind of maintain these things so I do want to step back but I don't know where who, myself, the patriarchy. It's so expensive to kind of maintain these things. So I do want to step back, but I don't know where to start because I've also got a Botox appointment in next month. So I don't know what I'm talking about.

Something which I wanted never to do on this podcast is to kind of reference Naomi Wolf. But I don't know if one of my first and most, I know, one of my first most seminal texts on like beauty and aging was the Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, who is, I believe now is, you know, real anti-vax does not need to be kind of someone we lean on. But I remember reading the Beauty Myth and she talks about beauty labor. You know, it's both anti-aging and it's just beauty maintenance in general as being like a third shift. So we go to work um you know we have kind of domestic labor and then we have this third shift of maintaining beauty it is getting your

nails done it is going to this appointment to get a needle in your face it is genuinely it's time and money it equates to labor and when i think about that then i get very cross and then i get really kind of self-reflective because it's my time that i'm not getting back like fuck the money not really but also like it's hours of my time that I will not reclaim yeah but then and this is so pathetic if I so for instance I once a week will put like a layer of tan on not dark tan just like a bit of a glow because I'm trying to avoid the sun in my later life because I didn't so much when I was younger later life later life reader she's 30 in the end times i just used to fry in the sun and i'd be like you know any chance but i've got it down to fine art i literally have a shower i scrub it off

i pop it on i wait an hour i do it's amazing that feels like a lot of labor but the plus of that is when i do that i feel so much better everything's easier i feel better in my clothes like it is it's annoying how much these things improve my mood like when I have my nails done and I feel like my skin's nice and I'm clean generally it does it kind of saves time in other ways because then I'm not like stressing and fretting and like feeling good in yourself is um is great but it is expensive so another message we got from a listener was I remind myself that aging is a privilege not afforded to all and I feel like that's quite a common sentiment that people say in response to you know the fear of aging the fear of how we look that having a future living is not

guaranteed it is a blessing and aging is you know the, the proof of a life well lived. And I don't know what you both think about this. I think on the one hand, it's so true. And it's so clear that that is the right way to think about it. But I can't find that message like penetrating me too deeply. I find that I just find it so hard to believe that in my bones because of all the conditioning that we get i agree completely i don't feel it until someone someone dies i think it is so clear and it's so penetrating at that moment when someone dies at the moment when you kind of go oh life is only so long for some people but then it does that falls away because the other stuff is so loud so I don't think it's it's a personal failure to kind of like lose the thread of that message even though it is completely and totally true the other stuff is just really really loud but it's also I think that relativity thing where like

it's like a film or something will bring you out of yourself it'll make you suddenly realize that oh my god this little bubble I'm living with and it's just so irrelevant the world's so much bigger than me and you know there's so many things to fight for and if we could all get into that headspace we would lose that all of the stupid things we worry about every day and the anxieties and stuff but that is physically impossible it's so hard because then you'll bump into a friend or like an ex-boyfriend or something will trigger you to like once again succumb to the feeling of like I want to look the best I've ever looked and also it feels far away there's that psychological concept where I think if something is too far in the future,

it's actually very hard for people to grasp onto it. For instance, like climate change or whatever. So when we think about the abstract concept, maybe abstract of us dying, I don't know about for you guys, but for me, that does feel, touch wood, I die, you know, at an older age. It feels almost too far away. It's kind of like how I used to view smoking when I was younger because everyone would be like it's so bad for you I'd be like I'm 12

yeah it's not gonna hurt me now I know exactly what you mean it's like childbirth and all the things I hear about that I still mentally feel like that's not me I'm I'm a 16 year old girl I think though that actually it's really psychologically healthy to not carry around a fear of dying all the time even if it is in service of like living every day to its fullest and like not caring about aging it's not healthy to think constantly about death point two i think some of anti-aging not all a lot of it's patriarchal a lot of it is misogynistic but some of anti-aging and some of like the whole wellness cult is to do with the fear of death i think that we chase younger looks and chase a kind of eternal youth because

of an inbuilt human fear of death i think we think okay if i eat properly if i eat clean if i look after my body if i kind of push down my visible age then I can cheat death I think it's a fear of death and I think that is the most human way to understand it rather than just just kind of pure vanity it's not just that but then on the flip side I wonder if it's something about just being like valued as a woman because as we know there's this whole idea that once a woman hits a certain age she becomes invisible within society and it can be really hard and disconcerting if you have especially had like a lot of value based on your looks to suddenly lose that part because I personally struggle or find it very interesting when women who are in their like 70s or 80s for instance like go and have a facelift

and this is my own this when I'm like doing workings out my own internalized misogyny because I'm like well who's what's that for then like what's the point like surely everyone's seen your face it really confuses me like I understand it when it's like someone in their 30s or 40s or 50s but when someone's so far into life so it must be what you're saying that it must be that fear of death because at that point I'm thinking like surely everyone's seen your face like what's going to happen to you now what's the pleasure so like how why does that kind of benefit you to spend that much money and go and undergo quite invasive surgery to change your appearance drastically to look younger when you are in later life yeah it's i'd love to talk to someone about that it's really weird as well so like for

instance sometimes i look at chris jenner and obviously she's had loads of work done she looks fantastic and then actually you'll see her kind of moving around and she has the physicality of like a 70 something year old but her face has been expertly chopped up to look you know much younger I wonder what it does to your psyche maybe you do feel maybe if you see a young person in the mirror you feel I wonder if it keeps you alive longer you know they always say that like the way to stay alive longer is to keep your brain active and to like stay around young people and do things. I wonder if you see yourself as a young person, if it could actually like elongate your life. I used to work with elderly people like when I was about 18 years old and I heard all the time.

It was like you rest, you rust. They were like, it's so nice to have a young person around. And as like I get a little bit older, I kind of do see that. Like that is the kind of through line. People are like, you have to act like you are the 35 year old you are inside. Otherwise you'll just fade. So maybe we're concluding that Botox is good for everyone because it keeps us young. That's what I'm getting from this.

Yes. Yep. The only other thing on that is about like the disconcerted thing. There's loads of studies to show that like babies, say for instance, if you had botox and you've got a young baby they don't know how to like respond or react to you because you're not doing your natural facial expressions they can't actually read your face it can cause a lack of bonding between like mother and baby they've done loads of studies so maybe you're allowed to have botox when you're childless and when you're a grandmother finally when we're a grandmother. Finally, women are allowed to do

what they want. So one message we got, which I think is very apt from a listener is this. This is perfectly timed as I found my first grey hair this morning. Do I feel pressured to avoid ageing? No, but it has taken some work, mental of course, to get to this place. I now think ageing is beautiful and I think some of the most beautiful people in my life are the wrinkliest but the love just radiates from them. Chef's kiss, think that's gorgeous, thank you. So I want to see if we can unpack how we got to this point where anti-aging has become one of the most prominent beauty ideals of our time obviously I feel like youth has been associated with beauty

so that's never really gone away or you know come out of the blue that's been around for a while and as we mentioned last week this is tied up with ideas of fertility. So, you know, a woman's value being that she can procreate and carry a child. So naturally, that ties into the younger a woman looks, the more fertile she is, the more valuable she's perceived in society. But I want to talk about any older women who are gorgeous and celebrated in society. Let's go. Me. Ah, the most celebrated of all time of course can i talk about my fave women my fave women my fave woman um susan sarandon oh i love her example who i think is in her later 70s now um and is obviously very beautiful don't know won't speculate on whether she's had procedures done or whatever, but she kind of looks like a woman who is, if not in her 70s, in her 60s. She looks great. She's

also really curious. She's also always at like marches. She's like really politically engaged. I think to me, that is like the woman. That is a really fascinating older woman who sort of hasn't slowed down in the traditional sense of like where is she she's very visible she's doing her thing her mind feels like as curious as ever I just love her I feel like the poster woman for sort of like natural aging that everyone always talks about is Helen Mirren Emma Thompson Emma Thompson yeah Emma Thompson Helen Mirren I feel like they're always everybody's like two references i wonder how annoying that is for them because they do get brought up literally constantly they're like look how gorgeous like emma thompson is and they do look amazing but one of my faves is definitely jillian anderson in terms of like people aren't

using her in that way where i think they're talking about helen mirren and emma thompson which kind of feels slightly patronizing actually because, because I think that they're just women going about their lives and clearly just haven't taken an interest in it. Whereas Gillian Anderson, everyone is just genuinely thirsting over her and seems to be kind of not caring that she has got visible signs of ageing and she's not in her 30s and people just think she's hot. And I think that's a really nice place to have got to where it's like actually women over the age of 30 40 can be hot and it doesn't need to be qualified in any way yeah yeah I completely

agree the two I thought to bring up were Salma Hayek who I looked up and she's 57 I feel like she's literally just like categorically perceived as sexy to everyone on this earth with a pulse and um Angela Bassett as well who's 65 and I'm just like fountains of beauty fountains of sexuality I just think they're amazing and I love them what was Angela Bassett in that film where she played like the older woman who how Stella got her groove back where she like is an older woman who hooks up with a younger man like the OG the idea of you have to watch it's really good I mean she's obviously a she's like 30 in that film but it is so good she is the original idea of you and famously Angela Bassett did the thing oh yeah, yeah, of course. She continues to do the thing.

Wait, how old is Angela Bassett? She's 65. 65. She's done the thing for decades and decades. Also, speaking of, it's just making me think of American Horror Story. Jessica Chastain is... No, wait, what's her name? Jessica Lange.

Oh, yeah. Oh, she's wonderful. Iconic, truly. We love an older woman, don we i was gonna say it's quite disconcerting because i'm trying to think of actresses like you're saying like salma haim it's 50 something and i just realized that actually lots of the ones that i probably think are gorgeous i haven't quite realized how old they are like how old's jada pinkett smith maybe she's only like 40 something i mean will young's in his 50s so Will Young sorry Will Smith her husband the gay British

singer Will Young Jada's 52 Wikipedia says she looks great it's so weird because we're definitely living in a generation where I think we're the first generation maybe to see it but especially because of the Kardashians acting in a way that even I'm starting to feel like I'm aging out of slightly for instance you know the very provocative pictures on Instagram or like even the style of bikini I'm wearing I'm kind of like actually I don't necessarily want to wear a full thong I kind of do want to cover my ass cheeks up a bit whereas in my early 20s I didn't I literally only wanted to wear Brazilian bikinis and that's not because I'm becoming more prudish I just feel like I have less I don't know that side of me is kind of diminishing a bit with age.

Whereas I feel like they're acting in a way that feels really young. And that's like warping my understanding of it as well. Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel like I have a similar thing with like covering up more, but I spoke to a friend about this the other day and it's like my idea of sexuality has changed

as I've got older. So, well, when I was younger, the day and it's it's like my idea of sexuality chain has changed as I've got older so well when I was younger I feel like the primary way of being sexual in your mind is just like showing skin whereas now I feel like it's like in you know I don't know an off-the-shoulder number that's like floor length and like there's all these like different ways where I just perceive myself as like still exuding what I think is like a version of my sexuality through clothing or appearance but it's like not necessarily by just like showing everything all the time if that makes sense our signifiers have changed for age within I guess like one or two generations

there's no kind of like coded fashion for the 50 plus the 40 plus the like 70 plus oxygenarian if you look like you know Cher and downwards there is like for the really visible figures they kind of all dress the same which is just like very glam and I do think that that does mirror back in terms of like how we dress as people like and I remember when we talked about like the idea of you um a few episodes ago it was very much the criticism was like that's not how a 40 something dresses you go but there is no such thing anymore of how a inter-age dresses or act like there's a complete blurring of age lines yeah i want to know what you both think about how the media has contributed to our ideas of aging so do you think that we're you know policing in the same way that tabloids used to women who are getting older or do you think that's changed i wonder if it's you know the thing we spoke about the other

week which was about how um basically tabloids have got smarter in the way that they so they will post pictures of women or they will say something about them and you can you know that that what their aim is is to deride and humiliate but they're kind of the language they're using is not because we have changed our perspective and people don't want to see the media being visibly misogynistic or cruel or ageist I think the pressures still exist I just think the tabloids are more like sneaky around the way that they do it. They will, of course, at any chance they get,

post an unfiltered picture of someone who maybe was trying to hide their skin or whatever. I think there's still that element of trying to shame, especially female celebrities, for how they look. But I just think it's more insidious that they will say things like yeah she's so and so is embracing aging just because you know or embracing her old age because she's got gray hair or whatever age or you know look at her look at her flaunt her natural body because she's put on weight with age it is yeah exactly it's just that kind of like

slightly coded language they're like such agents of the patriarchy that it's no surprise the depressing thing is is when we kind of do that when we kind of see the media go like old woman and then we go yeah old woman it's that kind of like shock like you know a woman on the beach it always happens with um pierce broadson's wife who is a gorgeous woman they've been together for ages she's in her 60s um and they kind of go must be true love things like that because she's gotten older and we do this for anyone who decides to either be visible as an older woman or to be visible in a way that isn't kind of looking like they're trying to be young so like a woman who

gains weight doesn't tie her hair doesn't have um who's oh Keanu Reeves's partner is like age appropriate and no one can get over it Keanu Reeves the man is 50s going out with an older woman also in her 50s and it's like unheard of in Hollywood like I mean this is a completely different point to where we started but that is baffling to me that like an early 50s man going out with a 59 or a woman is so unusual alongside with the tabloid shaming and the kind of cultural shaming of women who age in the last decade i would say botox has had a massive ironic cultural facelift to us and it's kind of become a bit of a meme so I'm thinking of you know Christine Quinn

in Selling Sunset when she was on the show doing uh I think it was a burgers and Botox event for her house sale and then also the Real Housewives constantly joke about getting work done and you know being overdue a Botox appointment it's become it's become this really light thing in society whereas I remember when I was really really young still feeling like getting work done was like this thing to be shamed and embarrassed of and it's not that at all anymore yeah I think it used to be something that we would associate only with the uber elite the uber rich and then now it is like kind of you know my friends that have very normal jobs they go and get their three-monthy botox appointment it's like because I have like

different groups of friends and my some of my friends are like media front-facing and I'm kind of just semi-aware that I just know that they get things done just because I kind of expect it or know it whatever and then I'll just speak to like a friend from school or something and all the girls or like different groups that I would never know and they're like yeah yeah I get mine done here and I'm like oh okay this is actually not just you know certain people or like it's kind of it's just become it's just a very expensive form of skincare basically it's like it's like every rung of the ladder you know you start off when you're 16 you're buying simple then you get to 18 maybe you're buying like Clinique and then, you know, maybe you're

looking into retinoids and then it's like, if you can afford it, you know, it's Botox. It's just become, it's completely lost that stigma of being like, oh my God, she's having work done. And I think also there used to be this whole narrative about how like natural beauty was so much worth so much more and sort of like women really clung on to this idea that they hadn't had anything done and now I think it's like people just don't care it's like yeah I get it done or I don't it's so true I also I think with Botox the point is and as a misconception with Botox that you get Botox and then suddenly you have this like youthful plump appearance with

Botox you have to kind of commit to it because what it does is freeze your kind of face in place so you don't deepen the existing lines you give them a rest so when you get botox you don't automatically look younger you then have to kind of commit for longer and longer times so it's the expectation of like well this is you now when you start getting it which i think really got me and it used to be like the Botox phase totally frozen now there's all these like subtle injections all over your face that you get like you say like every three months to keep aging at bay it's like a war between like your current face and this like horrible idea of oh my god I've got to keep my future face at bay the only other thing that I

almost think is more dystopian but again maybe this is just being like oh when my day is that Botox and one is one thing and like I really don't I wouldn't want to advocate for any women who aren't thinking about it to get it done but at least if you have Botox you can still like live a normal life it's doing the job of not letting you express yourself so you can still have fun there are young women on TikTok who are like I don't frown I don't laugh I use a straw that goes you know sideways so that i'm not pursing my lips to create wrinkles around my mouth and that to me i i is more worrying that people are literally stifling actively kind of like not moving their faces in certain planes so they don't create these wrinkles which is what botox does but usually as best said you do it when you know you've maybe already lived a bit of a life and there's already a bit of a

line and you kind of stop it and extracts from getting deeper the idea that there are like 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 year olds literally not expressing emotions for fear of showing that they've lived a life that kind of worries me a little bit more. I before we recorded message my sister who is 21 as of last month and I asked her does aging bother you is it something that you think about and she said at the moment it doesn't really bother her but she feels like if she gets to 23 and she sees like a line on her face that would stress her out and she'd probably think about it and yeah I don't know I can't remember how I felt age 23 but I'm fairly certain aging just honestly was not even crossing my mind it was all about being thin to

be honest and just like you know appearing to be a body shape that was accepted by society and maybe even like having lighter skin because that was a really specific hang-up for a dark-skinned Indian woman like myself but aging wasn't on the menu so I think that is a big change that is a shift you're so right about like the thinness thing I completely agree and also I've just thought back to like the original thing we were talking about about being 30 and I've realized that I do care less a little bit as in like I'm actually thinking like I don't know if I'm gonna bother getting Botox again because now that I'm 30 not I was about to say you're allowed to have wrinkles it's like expected I think almost my I've like let out a breath of air now that I'm 30 because it's like well if I do have a wrinkle of course I will I've reached

the age that a woman starts to expire if I'm not wrinkling and I'm not you know expire that's what I'm not that sorry that was not me that was me hyperbolically talking as a voice of the patriarchy got it got it I'm gonna mention a name and I want to talk about Brian Johnson and if there's a difference between the ways in which women fight aging to this man who has made it his sole mission to tell us everything he does to basically i don't know stop himself from dying and look 24 years old what does he do because he's there's quite a list i think the first one was he was like taking his there was the son's his son's blood he was having injected that was one thing what else does he do i know that there's been there's some penis rejuvenation oh lord about Lord. That he tweeted about.

Where it's, I think he says it's like shockwave therapy that costs like two grand to rejuve the peen. So both of those, I'm sure there's more. Quite extreme things in pursuit of aging, which is way more extreme than we've kind of said that we know women to be getting up to, or at least be owning up to. Not that it's a crime do you know what i think so interesting about him is when you see his before pictures to me he looks like a perfectly normal like fine man i was gonna say handsome but then i don't want to and um he like he's got he's got pores he's got a bit of a wrinkle and to me that is like what you know those things can be handsome on a man and then you see his now and he's poreless and he looks botox up to the hill and retinoid and creams and it looks really jarring because he's a man but if we saw a woman

do the same transformation visually as he's done to we would be like oh my god she looks better it's so weird how gendered that is because it's like men we usually do think men look better as they get older I've seen it even with like friends or like famous people as they get older I start to think god actually he's really handsome and the handsomeness that I'm viewing is due to the fact that their skin looks a bit more rugged or they've got a bit more hair or like so it's so interesting when this man has done a facial thing that a woman would love to do which is basically make her skin just completely smooth it kind of looks unattractive on a man which I think even in of itself is quite like funny he looks kind of um alien and kind of like snake-like because

it's so smooth and I can't think of any other man in the public eye who resembles him in that way but we are just you know constantly shown images of women who are like completely poreless and smooth and like that's normalized I think men who have crow's feet and all that kind of stuff like George Clooney vibes with silver hair that that has become labeled as attractive to us so if men do go down the anti-aging route, you know, like Simon Cowell had pictures looking quite... Can I say botched? Is that rude? No, you can say botched. So he looked quite botched, to be honest, and he had some work done. It wasn't the best.

And I think there is something culturally about seeing men go down that route at the moment that is unsettling and almost labelling that embarrassing, whereas we've kind of normalized women actively pursuing anti-aging at the moment yeah men are not allowed to do men are not allowed to to to have worked there's a very narrow parameter like fillers maybe a hair transplant yes but like don't talk about it too much it It's still a stigma. They kind of are expected to just grow. I will let them be graceful. We'll go, wow, I love your wizened look.

But if they don't want like a grisly wizened look, they're going to get judged. Whereas women have to. I mean, you're kind of fucked whichever way you cut it, but it is kind of easier for men because they can just naturally age and everyone will continue to be like, oh wow, he's so fuckable.

Whereas a woman, it's like, no, you actually need to pretend that you're 20 years younger but it's interesting that men when they do it we're like oh no we don't want you looking like that but when a woman does it it's like well done yeah job well done as you should it's like paul rudd everyone's like oh my god he looks so young he's just stayed young we're really obsessed with this idea of like a man's natural beauty it's totally different it's totally different how it presents but it's really interesting that if a man does age in a way that we appreciate um paul yard paul paul paul rod has stayed looking

very similar and then i think recently has you know he's a man in his his 50s is beginning to look like a man in his 50s and people go hmm hang on i thought you weren't going to age um so it does extend to everyone but it's worth for women but it does extend to men no one's safe so all of this anti-aging propaganda has an effect on us it has an effect on people older than us and it has effects on people that are younger than us we had a message from louise on instagram who said i was in a primary school recently where kids aged eight to ten were asking about my skincare routine we've spoken before on the podcast about gen z and the huge interest they have in skincare. I think it was our Christmas episode we talked about a 10 year old who had anti-aging products on her Christmas

list. Dove recently released a campaign with the slogan let 10 be 10 saying that they were fighting back against the pressure young people and children are feeling about preventing aging. And as a 31 year old I can say so confidently when I was 10 around that age I did not feel any major interest in anti-aging products or even like real doing like proper adult skincare like what has happened why has this filtered down to such a low age group what's going on can i just confidently say beth that you're not 31 well listen i'm rounding up which you'll understand when you're my age i was like do you have a passport or something i'm so

confused she's gone from being 30 almost 31 almost 31 now she's just 31 less said about that as the better what is happening with these 10 year olds that are worried about anti-aging that are doing like anti-aging skincare it was not true for us i mean as a 34 year old it was never ever true for me um i mean maybe that's me maybe you guys had different experience but i am i'm gonna say millennials we were doing like weird beauty stuff we were interested in the adult world but we were not trying to anti-age at like barely double figures I remember when I was at uni beauty and skincare YouTube was like going crazy and I was like religiously watching like Caroline Herons and like all the like OGs and I remember acids

started becoming a thing around then so So, you know, the pixie glow tonic, all of the like kind of pre retinal retinal kind of skincare stuff was like popping off. And I remember, I guess now that would count as anti-aging, but for me, it was all about just looking poreless. That was like my main fixation. And I remember just using it, not realizing that if you use that every day, your skin barrier is going to get fucked. I fucked up my skin barrier, erupted into like, I guess, I don't know, like maybe scabs or like something all over my face. And I think a similar thing is happening now where it's all of this stuff available with like retinol, acids, vitamin C, serums, everything. And I think it's kind of almost like just being a gateway to having good skin the assumption that you have to use all of these things I remember that piece we quoted in the cut

from that episode these like 12 year olds were having like 12 step skincare routines morning and evening so I did want to be like it was so much better in our day because I do feel like the psychological warfare that these poor retinal adult teenagers are going through must be a lot that being said though when I was at school people were literally putting like olive oil on their skin to tan on holiday when coming home with like third degree burns we were smoking getting sunbeds and the opposite of it we were age we were actively adding taking away years from our life the anti-aging was not a thing for us pro-aging so that actually when you put it like that you're like maybe it is a bit better to be you know

saving up to go to space and k on the weekend than it is to be literally cooking yourself under the sun i guess teenagers are always going to find a way to you know try and act like being adult it is scary but i was just thinking like there were definitely things that we were doing that were you know harmful I guess it's just harmful in another way did you see that story it was in the guardian that in Sweden a chain of chemists have basically decided that they're gonna stop underage people from accessing loads of these anti-aging products like retinols and acids without the consent of a parent a pharmacy called apotec hiartat i think i got that right and it has 390 pharmacies in sweden yeah unless customers under 15 have a parent with them and can consent they can't access it that seems smart even just to avoid what you went through for sure and what

also i've been through which is overusing the acids and completely blitzing your face because these ahas bhas retinoids aren't a joke if they're like medical grade you can do damage also they're really expensive so i don't sounds like a good idea i think it's such a good idea now that you said that it kind of makes you think like why isn't there skincare that says like 18 plus on it do you know what i mean i agree because also just for your skin generally anyway like it's like with a baby you only use certain really sensitive stuff when you're a teenager you need to be using that really gentle thing and maybe the really simple solution to this is just that like yeah you have to be 18 plus to access these things unless you know you've been prescribed it by a doctor or whatever

because it's just another thing as well for kids in the playground to be like i've got this i mean there was already pressure when we were at school you know someone might have the new kit pulling backpack or the new paper chase pencil case and now the girlies are being like I've got the drunk elephant tanning drops it's another extortionate way for kids to feel left out I can't think of one single good reason that somebody under 15 needs any of these products like Like I had horrific acne when I was 15. None of these products would have helped me. You know, like it's literally like you say, simple skincare and like even maybe medical grade where you would have a doctor prescribing you that anyway is the route to go down. I don't know, getting like 60 pound

Sunday Riley retinol drops is not, it not going to help it's not good for anyone unless they are at the right age to be using that stuff as much I kind of talk about aging I actually really don't care that much like I I still have that thing where I'm like it's quite far away and I also I sometimes think to myself like for instance today I went on my run I had my factor 50 on but my face it's a bit burnt I was like I wonder if in like 10 years I'll have like loads of age spots and I'll look back or I'll have like wrinkles around my mouth from when I've smoked or whatever and I'll be like I wish I didn't do it but right now in this moment I don't have strong enough urges to be like that invested this fear is huge is it just marketing is it literally just products

being really clever at marketing to kids because I can't really imagine being that age and this being my worry yeah well you mentioned the, the straw that like loops around and apparently means that you won't get wrinkles because you're not contorting your mouth to like that sucking shape, which also has been debunked by scientists. I saw online the Telegraph wrote a piece and anti-aging experts said that the only way you age is from sun damage, smoking and like loss of collagen a straw is not going to fucking stop anything yeah it feels like inventing a problem to sell a solution it's like oh my these regular straws that we've been using comfortably for as long as we've been

like sipping our cute little drinks like they're going to give you yeah well exactly they're going to fuck you up so here don't worry it's only like 16.99 here's your solution and it's how embarrassing you kind of like purse your lips around this it's like playing the flute yeah it looks like a wiggly flute it's really it's humiliating is sucking on a straw not literally like how we all got here that is sucking on a teat like do you know what i mean what are we gonna do are we gonna have baby are we gonna have like these like stick on nipple things that like adapt so that your baby doesn't get wrinkly mouth yeah how humiliating to just be like i've bought this because then when you've got a regular straw people know well she wants a drink when you've got an

anti-wrinkle straw people know inside your heart and so they go oh she's worried about a few fine lines it's exposing it's humiliating it is just money in some asshole's pocket but i actually don't think it is that beth i think that community of young girls who like have this fear and i feel bad for them like it must be a terrible way to live but it's almost like another stanley cup accessory like we've spoken about stanley cup mania before but you know you can buy all these little like extra add-ons to put onto a stanley cup and that's like a status thing i think this straw she was using in conjunction with the stanley cup so i think it's just going to be like another like special way to upgrade your stanley cup there's always like trends and

anxieties around girls when they're really young i feel like for us it was like this militant obsession with like thinness and like all these various ways of people like comparing notes and what they were doing to like be on track and it almost becomes competitive and then a bar to measure how well you're doing I wonder if this is like seeping in in the same way girls are like well I don't go out in the sun I only stay in the shade I only do this I only do that and it's like a metric to like shame each other and compete it is yeah you're right it is the the new dieting it is and when people are dieting they can't imagine that you don't care as much as they do and they're really affronted by it they're like but i hate myself i'm drinking the cabbage soup why aren't you drinking the cabbage soup and i

think all of these anti-aging procedures all of these like extra measures are the new cabbage soup it's so tricky because i feel like i'm so in it and so of it like on the one hand I feel like I don't care as much say an extreme but I certainly care more than I don't know some girl who's farming somewhere and has like never even given a thought to putting makeup on or whatever so there's like obviously a sliding scale like we're too late we're so sucked into the vortex we've been living this for too long like there are certain things that we will never undo we'll have certain like disordered behaviors that we will never be able to escape from because that is just the society in the world that we've grown up in and I think it's so hard to watch teenage girls or whatever go through it but as you say

like return generation upon generation does this but it's just sad because you think god that will probably stay with them forever. And with ageing, it's like it kind of I guess it is controllable with adaptables. But it's like you are going to get older, hopefully. The appearance of ageing is absolutely controllable. You can look taut, tight forever. You will still die. You will still be an old person. So it does feel like shadowboxing for a lot of money and a lot

of hours of your life that you don't get back and the idea that people are changing their behaviors to like bend around this cultural anxiety is so sad to me just the idea that somebody would say no to like planning a day out with a friend because i don't know they ran out of spf or it's going to be out in the sun and sun damage and all these anxieties it's just it's giving up life to look like you've you've not lived it I think you said that Beth and it's just that isn't it I was just thinking I wonder if like the younger people doing all this anti-aging stuff because then if they're doing that maybe their goal is that they'll never have to get Botox and have all these injectables because they've been like protecting their skin from such young age maybe that is kind of the end goal because did you have you seen on cropped

up on instagram now like i keep getting these videos where it's like i never did botox i never did this they show before picture and they show an after and they look perfect and what they do is basically like massage and tap their face for like eight hours before bed it's really depressing i feel like it's actually quite bleak the more you break it down imagine living so rigidly that you wouldn't smile too wide when somebody makes a joke or you won't like crease your forehead when you're like jokingly frowning at a friend I don't know it's just it's sad we like honestly I only just started like always having my makeup taken off in my late 20s we often would go to bed and you just kind of put mascara on in the morning on top of the mascara for the night before oh my god we did that yeah micellar water wasn't a thing when I was at school we just use face wipes which just move your makeup around your face

like the idea of double cleansing and toner like this was something that I got on it maybe it's just my age but we were like mid-20s but also I didn't start wearing makeup till much later as well like I didn't start wearing foundation until uni and that was like a bb cream and I didn't start wearing makeup until much later as well. Like I didn't start wearing foundation until uni and that was like a BB cream. And I wasn't putting on well at all. So like when we were wearing makeup, we weren't taking it off. And when we were like doing skincare, it was like a two pound peel off mask from Superdrug. Love those. Same.

It does feel like a diminished number of children's spaces. I'm not the first person to say this, but the internet and digital spaces had so many, like growing up, we had, you know, the Club Penguins. They weren't perfect. Like Habbo Hotel was for the purpose, but we had it.

We had Neopets. We had places where kids would go and now they're kind of shuffled into adult spaces. And we're going, God, it's weird that they're absorbing and mimicking adult content. But of course they are. They have nowhere else to go. That's what they're seeing. That's what they're going mimicking adult content. But of course they are.

They have nowhere else to go. That's what they're seeing. That's what they're going to do. That's kind of like they are sucking directly from the tea of like adult phobias of aging. It's kind of our fault. Not our fault, us three. But like our adult media is being beamed directly into young people's eyeballs. This is kind of the only end goal where all of these digital spaces have been flattened into like one consumer space rather than like go on neopets for a while go on

club penguin have a bit of fun like purely a leisurely internet we don't have a leisurely internet now we have commerce and you always see these memes but it's like this is what 13 year olds look like now and then like what i look like as a 13 year old and it'll be like blue eyeshadowing like red lipstick all around her mouth and then like what I look like as a 13 year old and it'll be like a blue eye shadow like red lipstick all around her mouth and then like her hair and different bunches of pigtails wearing like three bras with a vest on top like oh my god I do feel sad that they don't have these I know like I don't know if it's actually just me being jealous that they all just look so gorgeous so young or if I genuinely am feeling like god it's so sad that there wasn't a period of your

life where you all just look like the most awkward freaks that anyone's ever seen because there's something really joyful about when you're all just no idea what you're doing you can't do makeup they completely bypass that I've seen videos of like three and four year olds doing like using a sponge to apply foundation on like a Instagram video and I just had to swipe past it really fast because I'm thinking like oh but yeah the kid let the kids be kids it's good for the soul to have an awkward stage I feel it's good to have you know material for the memoir to draw back on when you know you went out to school in year nine with like clubbing makeup on and now you live to rue the day I think it's I think it's good for the soul I want to talk to parents of children of this age because I'm so curious like all of the challenges of parenthood

like how do you feel about this like you kind of prepare for all of the things that go wrong and you don't maybe prepare for the fact that your 10 year old might one day go I feel old as hell like I would have conniptions I just would not know what to do with that again on miss me Lily Allen's podcast she has two daughters and she realized that she's decided that she doesn't want her youngest daughter to have a phone at the same age that her eldest daughter did. So she read this book where this man says that what you need to do is get basically 10 other parents in your child's class to all sign a thing saying I won't give my child a phone either. They can just have like a phone that just rings but it's got no access to the internet. And that way it's easier to enforce a rule on your child when they've got like a group

of classmates who also have the same thing and I wonder if this is like going forward how parents are going to have to play it where it's like they have to play against the system because like with the makeup thing or with you know skincare and stuff you're probably gonna have to actually lobby other parents because the only way you'll get young kids or teenagers to listen to what you're saying is if their peers are also under the same rule. But I think that's got really difficult more lately because no one really knew the dangers

of kind of having social media or having a phone until it was too late. And so, yeah, basically, if your parent messaged us and tell us how you're handling this because I'm talking about nearly allen i don't actually know her personally our close personal friend so i think we've ended at a point where we're all just saying no easy answers no easy way to understand this a woman's fear of aging as an adult like can be a little bit premature it can also be really smart the world is very ageist uh it kind of feels

reductive to say just hang up your anti-aging serums and just like chill out it can also feel like it totally ignores the fact that this has infiltrated every age i feel terrified for young people i feel terrified for their parents um i'm hoping that our listeners will have something to say to us that will be a little bit enlightening um and give us a little bit more context but it just feels like a very unfolding conversation what will come next I've absolutely loved our double-barreled deep dive into beauty and it's definitely got me thinking I think it's things that I subliminally think all the time but more often than not I reach for the comfort of going do you know what there's a lot going on in life so let me just get my nails done and put my makeup on

and I'll sort of like come back to those Naomi Wolf thoughts of that I have when I've got a bit more time to digest but having this conversation especially this one about aging especially about like sending example to younger women I guess has got me thinking that maybe I do need to take a bit more culpability for how I maneuver myself what about you guys how are you feeling after these deep dives I don't know if anything has changed before and after but what has changed is just almost like a renewed sense of I really want to have a good sense of self and just feel that like self-acceptance is from deep within rather than like surface level because I feel as if at the moment I've got to a place I felt like I feel

quite confident but the more I unpick this stuff I feel like actually there's a lot of if ands and buts so oh I feel good when I'm wearing a good outfit I feel good if I get a haircut all of these things help and it would be good to get get a haircut. All of these things help. And it would be good to get to a place where these things are nice, but they're not informing how I feel about myself. Agreed. I think I want to grapple a little bit more

with my feelings about it because I feel so confident more than ever at whatever age I am. I've even forgotten at this point. But I also am doing probably more than ever or like i'm spending more money on it i'm it's a very much concern for me and i would like because life is very short i would like not like one not to be an agent of the patriarchy encouraging other women to worry about you know fine lines or like oh my god your subcutaneous

fat is whatever thinning you're like epidermis is doing this. Like you wouldn't, you'd get to heaven or hell and be like, God, I wasted my time. But I also don't want to beat myself up for what I've done so far. So I think it's just a gentle internal process. So I do feel, I'm excited to listen to this episode back and hopefully then make my mind up. My new thing that's happened in the last few years

is when I see a woman with wrinkles, I think, oh God, she looks good. Isn't that interesting? Because it's like, you're actually not used to seeing it. It can be quite surprising when someone hasn't, especially in the public eye. And so I actually think I'm going the other way where I'm starting to almost find women more attractive

when I can see that they've aged. And so maybe that will happen universally and then we'll be freed from the shackles that is injecting toxins into our faces such a good point that's such a good point actually because if we say that beauty is confidence what is more confident at this point in time than going you know I didn't care enough to spend money on it I just these are my wrinkles like that is like the epitome of confidence. Oh my God, you've changed my mind. I'm going to cancel my Botox appointment.

Do it! If you haven't heard our Makeover special, you can head back to listen to that now. Please message us if there's anything you want to add to this conversation. We're on Instagram and TikTok at everythingiscontentpod. We'll be back next week for more of the usual, so make sure you are subscribed immediately so you don't miss a thing. Bye! Bye!

Everything Is Content is a Grape Original Podcast and we are part of the ACAST Creator Network. This podcast was created, devised and presented by us, Beth McCall, Ruchira Sharma and Anoni. The producer is Faye Lawrence and the executive producer is James Norman Fyfe.