I used to be an advocate for people looking younger than they are. For that reason, I thought that products that took care of bald spots and gray hair were fantastic.
While readers (especially readers who personally know me) might chuckle at the image of a younger version of me seeing the virtues of products like Bosley and Just for Men, I think that this story is a microcosm of a form of injustice.
The injustice is that looking old is stigmatized.
Everything, from the fixation on products that make you look younger, to the compliments we give our friends and family members when they look younger than they are, has the stigma of looking old attached to it.
For example, many of us are fixated on anti-skin wrinkle products because those products make us look young. I know this because so many of the positive reviews on products such as Neutrogena’s Anti-Wrinkle Cream focus on how the product makes certain reviewers look younger. For that matter, even a couple of the negative reviews say that the product does not help the reviewers look younger. If we didn’t place so much value on looking young, and so much stigma on looking old, a product like Neutrogena’s Anti-Wrinkle Cream might not be so popular in the first place!
Another way we exalt youthful looks, and stigmatize elderly looks, is that many of us often compliment people who look younger than they say but seldom (Never?) give compliments when people look older than they say. When a 60-year-old looks like he or she is 50, some of us may say a compliment like: “You don’t look a day over 50!” But when a different 60-year-old looks like he or she is 80 or 90, we don’t say anything, or maybe even secretly think about how the person looks like a great grandma or great grandpa.
These examples demonstrate how many of us value youthful outside appearance, and look down upon looking old, whether we intend that or not. It is ageist of us to place so much value on looking young, and so little value on looking old, because we are judging people on the basis of the age they look.
I hope that this can change one day, and that we can all see the beauty of looking young, looking middle-aged, and looking old. There is value and beauty in all stages of life, and yes, that includes value and beauty in accumulating gray hairs and wrinkles. So the younger version of me was wrong—products which take care of bald spots and gray hair aren’t that fantastic, after all!
Author’s note: If you want to learn more about ageism, please refer to last week’s blog post.
Blind Injustice 