Consider This

By LC Van Savage

The anti-wrinkle business in this country has got to be a multi-trillion dollar industry. Shelves in the cosmetics sections of all stores, even the lowliest, sell such a gigantic variety of creams and lotions to remove our facial wrinkles that the shelves holding them sag, but only briefly, because those bottles, jars and tubes are quickly swept up and away by women (and many men) who want to regain their baby-butt youthful facial glow and smoothness.

Guess what? They can’t. Sure I believe in putting lotion on my face and I’ve even tried some of the better known anti-wrinkle creams, but surprise, after spending around $87 an ounce, those familiar facial crevasses are still there! Every last crease of them, along with their multiple offspring. They’re lately moving across my face the way a windshield crack gradually spreads, and stuffing all my facial fissures with lotions and potions, greases and creams isn’t slowing the process one iota.

I’m not one of those women who walk about stating that "I’m proud, proud, proud of my facial wrinkles. I’ve earned every one of ‘em." I don’t think I’ve earned anything of the sort. I think my collapsing face is the result of several occurrences: too much sun back in the days when daily sun-roasting to the color of burned caramel was hip, too much smoking back in the days when too much smoking was hip, (yes, I quit about 25 years ago) concentrating on not frowning all the time, (being told by a teacher in grade school that if I didn’t stop scowling those trenches between my eyebrows would become deep enough to collect rainwater,) raising 3 sons and one husband, and living for 65 years.

Do we really have to run this race against ourselves? Yeah. We do. Why? Because TV and magazines tell us to, and many of us, either consciously or un, believe the words from those sources to be gospel.

Used to be that women slathered great globs of white, greasy cold-cream all over their faces at night and slept flat on their backs with pillows rolled under their necks to prevent their rolling over and sleeping on their slick, lard-covered cheeks, getting their sheets and pillow cases permanently blotched. Honestly I don’t know how people procreated back then, but they somehow managed.

There weren’t many choices then of what to load onto faces for those searching for the fountain of youth. Today, there are thousands. We can buy stuff to tighten and pull back our skin so we resemble faces in a wind-tunnel until about 6 PM when gravity wins and everything slowly crumbles like a mummy taken into the air after centuries and we look our old selves again. We can lighten old age spots, or so they say. Never happened for me. We can add stuff to our skin that I think has ground mirrors in it so our faces glow and shine, or we can add a coppery tone to our skin so we can look as if we’ve just returned from the islands. Both things are nice until we brush up against someone’s shoulder and either leave behind a glittery blotch of ground glass or a nasty smear of Coppertone.

As for me, I’d have to load stage make-up onto my face with a backhoe and have my photo taken through a plank to achieve the look for which I so yearn, and even then it’d be a lost cause.

Thus, I guess I’ll just keep on pushing discount lotions onto my face and bod to keep my skin from feeling like a burlap bag full of dried cactus, or from cracking apart in the Maine winters, like baked mud.

But see, here’s the deal. We spend zillions on those sexily advertised balms so we can fantasize that we might look like those age-free models, and then alas, guess what? We die anyway.