Why Ageing Is Not Something To Fight
A different starting point changes everything. When we stop treating ageing as failure, we begin to formulate - and perhaps live - differently.
Spend enough time around the beauty industry and you begin to notice something curious about the language we use when we talk about getting older.
Fight ageing. Reverse it. Defy it. Prevent it. Hide it.
Even anti-ageing, perhaps the most familiar term of all, carries an assumption we barely notice anymore: that ageing is undesirable, and that our job is to resist as much of it as we can.
We've heard this language for so long that it sounds perfectly ordinary.
But what if ageing was never the problem to begin with?
Ageing is not a malfunction
Ageing is one of the few experiences every person on earth shares. It isn't a condition we develop, or evidence that the body has made some kind of mistake. It is what happens when we have the extraordinary good fortune to continue living.
And yet we have become remarkably uncomfortable with the evidence of it.
A line appears and we look for a way to erase it. Skin changes and the conversation quickly becomes about correction - how to firm it, smooth it, tighten it, brighten it, or somehow persuade it to behave as it once did.
I don't think there is anything wrong with wanting to look after our skin. Nor do I think we need to pretend that every change we see in the mirror delights us. We are allowed to care about how we look. We are allowed to want beautiful skin.
What interests me is the premise from which that care begins.
If we start with the belief that ageing skin is failing skin, then correction becomes the obvious response. More intervention. More stimulation. More reasons to persuade skin to be something other than what it currently is.
But there is another place from which to begin.
What if we remained curious about what skin needs now?
Skin does change with age. Its biology changes. The environment in which it functions changes. What supported it beautifully at thirty may not be what supports it beautifully at fifty, sixty or seventy.
None of that requires us to regard it as defective.
This distinction became increasingly important to me as I developed MĀERENE. I found myself much less interested in asking how quickly a formulation could make skin look younger, and far more interested in understanding how ageing skin might be supported to function well.
Could we improve compatibility rather than continually increase intensity? Could we interfere less? Could we support the skin's own capacity to adapt rather than constantly asking it to respond to another correction?
Those questions lead somewhere quite different from the traditional anti-ageing brief.
They also leave room for something the beauty industry doesn't talk about nearly enough: ageing well and appearing younger are not the same ambition.
There may be overlap between them, of course. Healthy, well-supported skin may look smoother, more supple and more luminous. But youth cannot be the only measure by which beauty is judged, because eventually that leaves every one of us on the losing side of an impossible contest.
I find the alternative much more interesting.
There are people who become more compelling as they grow older. Their faces carry more history, not less. There is character in them, and ease, and often a kind of beauty that would have been impossible at twenty-five.
That doesn't mean we stop caring for ourselves. Quite the opposite.
It means the care no longer has to come from opposition.
Perhaps there is something liberating in allowing time to leave some evidence that we have been here - while still caring deeply for the skin that carries us through it.
That is the starting point from which MĀERENE formulates.
We do not formulate against ageing. We formulate in honour of it.
Gabi Bayly
Founder & Formulator, MĀERENE