That the launch of a – purportedly – rejuvenating moisturiser is now considered national news is, you have to admit, a kind of progress.
Well within living memory, face cream manufacturers would have found coverage of their triumphs hidden away, if they made it out of women’s magazines, somewhere within the lifestyle pages. And even there someone might ridicule the more absurd claims. Or some feminist muscle memory might respond adversely to the expectation that women should fall upon anything claimed to alleviate signs of non-youth, a project that Susan Sontag described in 1972 as women’s “passionate, corrupting effort to defeat nature: to maintain an ideal, static appearance against the progress of age”.
The realisation, accelerating since Boots’s 2006 launch of Refine & Rewind, that the project to stop women looking old is, on the contrary, a noble and edifying cause that everyone should get behind, last week ensured enthusiastic coverage (even in news sources where this was not part of a sponsorship deal) of a skincare package that costs £495 for a starter set, to last one month.
Much was made of the boast, courtesy of its marketers, that Lyma’s new product, solemnly claimed to be “the first to address why skin ages”, had attracted a waiting list of 30,000 people, many presumably existing fans of a brand that is proudly cherished by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, the rectal ozone therapy authority.
To add to the good news, my own visit to the website indicated that, however prodigiously long the Lyma waiting list recently became, you can get a delivery of its “breakthrough” skin cream in around a week.
Invest and, assuming the manufacturer’s claim – “transforms skin in just 30 days” – is not deliberately worded to exclude the key word “visibly”, you could be looking at a different reflection by as early as mid-August.
“Skin doesn’t just look younger, it is younger,” Lyma insists, with its signature vague hyperbolism. But you can’t fault its effusions for a shortage of scholarly references, which include a fascinating study of albino hairless mice (“The mice were treated according to the Ethical Guidelines”). How great that the albino hairless mice could contribute, even inadvertently, to Lyma’s “proven ability to induce unprecedented transformation to the appearance and future of your skin”.
Supposing that claim is true, and the 30,000 on Lyma’s waiting list are duly regenerated over time, inspiring tens of thousands more customers, is it fanciful to imagine a day within the world’s wealthier retirement communities, when the female residents are so miraculously young-looking that they can be distinguished from staff only by the latter’s uniforms? If so, it would be helpful, to avoid disappointment, to get some idea of the transformational limits.
Possibly aware that Paltrow’s endorsement does not everywhere command the respect it did before her company’s fine for unscientific claims about vaginal eggs, Lyma is generous with alternative proofs of efficacy including (in the absence of double-blind tests) its “goal to be the first in the world to achieve next-level testing results”.
Conventionally, results come before a sale, but, explains Lyma’s chief tester, “this is the hardest science imaginable”.
For now, customers must be satisfied with some unalluring before-and-afters, reams of trademark-studded jargon and selected reviews for previous products: Lyma’s “breakthrough” laser and a food supplement. Advertisements for the latter, Lyma Life, were found by the Advertising Standards Authority to have twice breached the non-broadcast advertising code in 2021: “We [also] told them not to state or imply that their food supplements could prevent, treat or cure human disease.” But this is obviously no reason for buyers to mistrust a new skincare range limiting itself to claims like “skin ageing is no longer inevitable”.
Since the general horror of female ageing does, however, seem undiminished since Sontag was writing, it’s understandable if affluent women are tempted. A host of our younger witches, hags and Karens can confirm that even reasonably unwrinkled skin will never offer full protection against their age being weaponised by critics, but the anti-ageing industry still markets an imagined reprieve from levels of learned self-disgust that have yet to afflict many men. If the possibility to de-age exists – via Botox, fillers, surgeries, lasers, vampire facials – would it be self-harming, in fact, not to benefit?
In this way, age-defying advances being hailed as good news – including by people with no obvious stake in pathologising a normal process – perpetuate bodily maintenance as the one chore that advancing technology only ever makes more oppressive for women. As one study has put it, “Ageing becomes their fault.” Customers are urged, for instance, to combine Lyma’s skincare with the £1,999 laser that consumers are advised to use daily with an accompanying oxygen substance costing £99 a month.
Meanwhile, the aesthetic surgeons do their bit: Sontag was writing before they came up with “vulvar appearance” or focused on “the aesthetic subunit of the philtrum”. Is there a man in the world bothered about his philtrum? OK, maybe Jeff Bezos and that billionaire currently sustaining his youth with his son’s blood.
Elaborating on “the double standard about ageing”, Sontag noted that men, with alternative measures of self-esteem, were allowed to look older; women, given the then available jobs, depended upon their aesthetic subunits.
Fifty years on, the marketing of every new skin product confirms the survival, long after the arrival of female job satisfaction, of a double ageing standard that liberates most men from considering, say, 14 hours a month running a laser over their face, but proposes this endless upkeep – one accompanied by no guarantees of improvement – as a sensible investment of a woman’s time and money.
The only men you notice in connection with Lyma, as with many anti-ageing products, are the busy scientists “in their crisp white capes”, as that company exhilaratingly depicts heroes who have taken time away from some vital petri dish to remind women that ageing is, maybe more than ever, for losers.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
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