Ben writes: “Can you imagine this generation of old people without laugh lines? It’s just wrong. You’re supposed to get wrinkles & lines as you age.”
And so I’m reminded of something I read the other night in “Unmasking Skin“, Joel L. Swerdlow’s article in this month’s National Geographic:
But many people want more extensive results than such sensible measures afford. Americans now spend over 300 million dollars annually on the injection of botuliunum toxin — produced during World War II by the U.S. biological weapons program — that temporarily paralyzes facial muscles to stop habitual movements, such as frowning, that contribute to lines and wrinkles. An estimated 1.6 million botulinum toxin (known as Botox) treatments were administered in the U.S. in 2001.
With such treatments, it seems to me, your face becomes less the story of your life and more the measure of your vanity and bank account, a step toward Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which faces remain “youthful and taut-skinned” throughout old age.
Without question, I understand the fear of death and of growing old alone, but physically getting older doesn’t especially frighten me. Nor do I understand why it should. I think I would be amused more than anything to find a gray hair atop my head. It’s ridiculous to go to such lengths to avoid wrinkles and the natural signs of aging. Our bodies are what we make of them, but we don’t get to keep them forever, however hard we try.
In the BBC documentary, “The Human Face“, John Cleese made an interesting point by quoting the author of that other dystopian novel, George Orwell, who said that “at 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
“You have a basically positive, cheerful kind of approach to life,” Cleese later told television critics, “then as you get older, that begins to etch itself into your face. Whereas if you’re beautiful when you’re 16, you absolutely haven’t done anything to deserve it.”
Right now, coincidentally, I’m listening to Cleese sing the wonderfully silly “I Want Another Slice Of Rhubarb Tart” (290k, mp3), and I’m not remotely worried that the laughter that’s on my face will be readable years from now as creases, lines, or crow’s-feet. I’m not afraid to laugh or frown or wrinkle. When I’m older, I want a face that shows where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and that reveals the sort of man that I am.
“…You can see good qualities in somebody’s face,” Cleese said in an interview with DVD Angle, “and we finish up with some great faces like the Dalai Lama and Mahatma Ghandi, and you see something that is not beautiful in the ordinary boring sense of the word, [but] which is profoundly beautiful because it reflects human qualities that we all admire.”
Botox? Puh-lease.