Her Beauty Was Never on Their Clock - Fact 18

THE WOMAN PROJECT — Woman Fact 18

Youth is a devil in disguise, making us gullible, not good enough, that we as women have to always meet a certain standard in beauty. especially when you were told that you are the ugly duckling, that no one wanted aound. As I grew older I realised that I had my own unique identity, my own unique beauty, just like every woman out there. The trick is not to lose yourself on the pathway of growth, responsibilities. I could never understand why younger woman would try to be me, silly. It is who you are within, that shines bright on the outside.

The beauty industry is worth over $600 billion, built almost entirely on convincing her that her own aging face is a problem worth paying to fix. Here's the twist nobody advertises: older women report feeling less pressure about it than anyone.

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Somewhere along the way, beauty got a countdown timer attached to it, one that was never actually part of the original design. AARP's large-scale Mirror/Mirror survey found 41% of women aged 18 to 49 feel real pressure to meet beauty standards. Among women 50 and older, that number drops to 22%, nearly half. Women over 50 also report showing their authentic, unfiltered selves far more often, 77% of the time at work, 88% with family, than younger women do.

In other words, the expiry date the industry keeps selling doesn't match what women actually experience as they age. Researchers at AARP describe it plainly: as women get older, they become more comfortable in their own skin, less susceptible to outside pressure, stronger in their own convictions. The beauty industry sells fear of aging. Actual aging women report the opposite: more freedom, not less.

Here's what deserves saying: that expiry date was never handed down by nature. It was manufactured, and marketed, by an industry with a $600 billion reason to keep selling it. The women who've actually lived past the deadline seem to be the ones laughing at it the hardest.

THINK IT

Think of a woman you admire who's older than you. What do you actually see when you look at her, and does "expired" describe any part of it?