Beauty is Skin Deep and Even Deeper

Beauty is a highly subjective thing.  It definitely exists in the eye of the beholder.

Our North American society idolizes skin that is unblemished, smooth and wrinkle-free, - skin that looks like we have just graduated from high school.

There are wrinkle creams, botox injections, surgical facial lifts and other modern miracles that  often give people the appearance of a "plastic" or unnatural look.

Whatever turns your crank, I say.

When I go to medical conferences, the new and growing field in natural medicine is a combination of therapies that take away your wrinkles and make your skin look "ageless".  These therapies include facial acupuncture, mesotherapy (injecting "natural" medicines into points on the face), and of course, vitamins and supplements.

This is a big buck industry.  Had I pursued this field of natural medicine, I'm sure my income would have tripled.  An emormous amount of people are obsessed with looked younger.

However, as I told the doctors that were doing their sales pitch on me at the conference, - I do not subscribe to this philosophy.

It is a philosophy that says 20 year old skin is more beautiful than 70 year old skin; that youth is everything and growing old is the shits; a philosophy that says you get less sexy as you grow older.  And it is a philosophy that says wrinkles look ugly.

My philosophy goes like this:

Twenty-year old skin is beautiful.  Seventy-year old skin is beautiful.  Youth is a wonderful time in our lives and our aging process is wonderful also.  Sexiness has nothing to do with how we look and everything to do with how we feel inside.  And ....

.... wrinkles are beautiful.

Smooth non-wrinkled skin is beautiful as are deeply carved wrinkles. 

I believe in the freedom of choice first and foremost.  So whatever people decide to inject into their faces is their business.  However, this is not to be confused with healthy skin.

Healthy skin is glowing, no matter what age you are.  Healthy skin has color and life to it, no matter what age you are.  And healthy skin is well hydrated, no matter what age you are.  (However, it does becomes more and more important as you age to get your 8 - 10 glasses of water in everyday).

Wrinkles are the road map of the life we have lived.  They are our history.  I suppose we could wipe out that history and replace those beautiful grooves with extra tight layerings, but I am partial to grooves myself.

Laugh lines around the mouth and crows feet around the eyes remind us of the decades of joy, laughter and smiles that gradually carved out that beautiful history into our face.  Wrinkled brows remind us of the not-so-happy times, but that we survived them, and we are wiser and better because of those times.

If our society as a whole celebrated age as we do youth, we would be celebrating our wrinkles instead of wiping them out.  If our society as a whole celebrated wisdom, aging would be beyond beautiful- it would be sublime.

As an entire population of baby boomers begin to age into their 50s, 60s and 70s, we will reach a critical mass of people that can make an ideological shift in our society that goes like this: 

Wrinkles are beautiful.  Aging is beautiful.