Have you ever noticed the current frenzy revolving around anti-aging?  It’s like an express train going nowhere.

Growing old is depicted as something women should avoid at all costs, and should be willing to pay-through-their-teeth to escape.  It puts a great amount of pressure on women of all ages to dodge the inevitable.  This frenzy locates the definition of beauty on the surface, ignoring the true beauty of what’s on the inside.

Anti-aging creams, serums, gels, and moisturizers can’t make a woman a better person.  No amount of firming, toning, or fine line reducing will change the fact that as the years pass, the skin we walk in ages.  Consumer Health Digest writes that “the skin’s ability to repair and produce* collagen and elastin slows down” when we age.  It’s unavoidable, yet women scramble to buy the most expensive products, and slather them on with vain hopes that somehow, they will be the first 40-ish and up woman to thwart the natural aging process.

The irony is – women tend to worry more about getting older and becoming less attractive than men do, which results in the internalization of stress, which in turn causes our bodies to age at an accelerated rate.  Gray hair, weight gain, wrinkles – all of it scares the crap out of women.  I read in one article that on average, women spend approximately $8 per day on beauty products.

Let’s do the math on that:

$8 x 7 days = $56 a week.

That doesn’t sound like all that much, but let’s further appraise the monetary costs.

$56 x 4 weeks = $224 a month (and in months with 5 weeks, that’s $280).

Okay, so now it sounds a bit pricier, right?  Let’s go one step further:

$56 x 52 weeks = $2,912 a year.

I don’t know about you, but when I see that cost for one year, my reaction is Holy Shit!  So as women, if we spend that paltry $8 a day for 10 years, we’ve just blown $29,120 – that’s a car, people – or even a down payment on a house in a nice area, and the worst part of it?  We still age.

As a society, women spend their lives worrying about staying young.  I get it.  I worry about it too, but shouldn’t we, as a gender, be more concerned about the development of who we are under our skin?  Shouldn’t we aspire to create beauty within ourselves, and find happiness in our life achievements?  Isn’t that more important than whether or not we have crow’s feet?  External beauty will fade.  Internal beauty lasts forever – through our interactions with others, our children, and our legacy after we’ve left this world.

Embrace your true beauty ladies, and amaze the world around you with its depth!