Featured Article

A Current between Shores: On Aging

By Rose-Anne Clermont |

by Rose-Anne Clermont
- Germany -



Dermitáge's ads promise anti-aging with airbrushed before and after images.
Around the time little girls become preoccupied with their own reflections, I remember scanning the various jars of creams and tonics on my mother’s make-up table. I couldn’t yet read so well, but I noticed on the labels that the word AGE was always belittled by a hyphen and another word that “combated,” “defied” or “anti’d” it in some way. Once I started playing with make-up samples in drugstores, I’d see row upon row of these labels: anti-wrinkle; anti-aging; age-defying. Before I reached puberty, I had learned that aging was something to protest.

Now, nearing forty—and completely uninterested in make-up—I’m the target age for the exorbitantly priced cosmetics that promise to work against the effects of time. Although politically correct advertisers today claim to embrace the beauty in aging women, the forty-something models look like they’re twenty-five. The fifty-somethings barely have grey hair and look like me on a good day. The sixty-somethings are ridiculously airbrushed and women in their seventies are noticeably absent.

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