Feidias Psaras
October
And the daily skincare routine keeps getting longer. Whereas before, a bathroom cabinet with the bare essentials was only occasionally punctuated by the odd cream, now the dental hygiene products are beginning to feel outnumbered. The impulse is to accept the new normal as something that people do as you slowly become acquainted with the adult world and all its prerequisites.
But that’s not really the case. In 2023, the beauty market was estimated to be worth €280 billion, increasing almost three-fold since 2000. The wall of cleansers, moisturizers, toners, exfoliants, retinols and eye creams that you’ll find at your local pharmacy are a testament to this explosive expansion. A quick look through TikTok gets you acquainted with beauty influencers ranging from the age of thirteen onwards detailing you through their elaborate 10-step skincare routines. The internet at large is replete with the modern personal beauty equivalent of snake oil: natural herbal treatments and strange-smelling ointments that hold mystical rejuvenating properties. But people buy these regardless.
The fact that the skincare industry—and the beauty industry in general—caters to an overwhelmingly female demographic is indicative of the differences in social expectations for beauty for women versus men. This gender bias is all-pervasive; an extensive study analyzing 3.5 million books found that women are described using adjectives relating to appearance two times as often as men, highlighting the disproportionate importance we attribute to physical appearance in valuing women.
This phenomenon is even more prevalent in some countries—in South Korea, for example, it’s common practice for parents to pay for their children’s plastic surgery after high school as a reward for high academic performance. There seems to be very little stigma surrounding the act. In fact, the culture around the practice involves commenting on how pretty a person is after they’ve had plastic surgery. High school hallways are full of full-length mirrors that students stare at unabashedly, and high schoolers often come back from winter breaks ready to show off their new noses.
This culture of youth, spurred on by predominantly visually-based forms of social media and the enviably attractive influencers that naturally come to dominate them, is a symptom of people’s obsession with retaining their youth—both because it’s so intimately linked with beauty and because it signifies distance from death.
The latter is infinitely more unshakeable to the human condition than the former. Concepts like the fountain of youth, appearing in Herodotus’s writing as far back as 5 BC, exemplify the timelessness of the human desire to stave off the inevitable. Even in strands of thought that explicitly argue against the conventional stance toward death and aim to frame the process of aging in a positive light, the fear of it remains. The prospect of death is this fixed point around which large swathes of human thought, and all of us individually, struggle to find footing.
Until, allegedly, now. Amidst a slew of overambitious billionaires pouring small fortunes into a growing number of biotech companies focused on maximizing longevity emerges the apotheosis of a fixation on staying young. Bryan Johnson, centimillionaire tech magnate turned hyper-fitness-guru, is dead-set on optimizing his health habits in order to live as long as possible. His daily routine, detailed by him in one of the videos uploaded on his YouTube channel, features him waking up at 4:30 am and engaging in a 30-minute long morning skincare routine featuring dozens of supplements such as retinol and UV light repellent creams. In his kitchen, he describes the health benefits of the brightly green paste set out for him for the week alongside a dozen or so supplementary pills. After a day packed with so many drawn-out and precise rituals that one wonders what time is left in order to live, he goes back to sleep at 8:30 pm.
Project Blueprint, which features a team of researchers working at King’s College London, is funded by the subject himself. Johnson, who says that the process has lowered his pace of aging by over 31 years, describes himself as a transhumanist. Repeatedly in public appearances, he states his firm belief that with the advent of AI, we are at an inflection point in our history. Soon, he believes, there will come a point where the only question preoccupying humanity is overcoming our heretofore unavoidable mortality. Indeed, Johnson believes that he is doing a public service—that by offering himself as a ‘guinea pig’ in this project, he will be contributing large amounts of crucial research to the field of longevity research.
Indeed, over the years, Project Blueprint has spread to many people. Johnson has been hosting regular meetups in New York City and garnered a vast audience, including a sizable number of die-hard loyalists. Alongside the informal fanbase, there have been steps to expand the project more concretely; around 5000 people have volunteered to take part in extended clinical trials that aim to test effectiveness on a broader population.
The widespread success of such efforts encapsulates a youth-obsessed culture dead-set on staying —or looking—healthy to an unhealthy degree. Even though we might believe that a little vanity is unavoidable, the elaborate age-halting rituals of the elite, whether Bryan Johnson’s or Courtney Kardashian’s, are a testament to how scaleable our self-obsession is. They exemplify the extent to which some of us will go, if given the resources, just to postpone the tough mental reckoning that is inherent in growing up; to come to terms with the fact that we are not anymore a set of potentialities, as we always were, but a single human being inside space and time, within and subject to life’s course. It is important to ask ourselves, then, at what point the skincare routine gets long enough that we choose to let go rather than hold on.