FOREVER YOUNG
A User’s Guide to Cheating Death explores our quest for eternal youth
Our culture is fixated on keeping up appearances. From snapping selfies to posting pictures of brunch on Instagram, it’s estimated that people will take a hundred billion more photos in 2017 than they did in 2016. And most of those images will be taken on smartphones and shared online.
On one hand, social media platforms have been a democratizing force. Add in some fun filters and a cute pose and, for a moment, we can all be celebrities. But has the digital era also amplified our obsession with aging?
Timothy Caulfield thinks so. He’s the author of Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash, and host of A User’s Guide to Cheating Death, a new six-part investigative TV series on VisionTV. The show explores the space where science, business and pop culture intersect and the increasingly controversial treatments people use to alter their bodies or their health in the hopes of staying forever young.
A longtime crusader for ethical, legal and health policy, Caulfield says that there has always been a biological reason why looks matter. The theory is that our ancestors selected mates who looked young and energetic to promote survival. And tall, strapping individuals were probably seen as good leaders and protectors.
These subconscious biases, he says, persist in our modern lives. A 2009 study by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that 73 per cent of women felt a youthful appearance played a role in getting a job, getting promoted or keeping clients. And while we like to think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, statistically we seem to prefer traits such as facial symmetry. A team at the University of Wisconsin analyzed photos of 55 male CEOs of large companies and compared those companies’ assets. The companies with CEOs whose faces were wider relative to their facial height performed better financially.
A User’s Guide to Cheating Death delves deep into our efforts to exploit such preconceptions, everything from facelifts to second-skin technology. In one episode, Caulfield travels across Canada and to Korea to talk to patients and practitioners of today’s most popular anti-aging techniques.
“The pressure to be youthful has never been stronger,” says Caulfield. “I was stunned by how normalized cosmetic surgery has become.” Part of the reason is that procedures have become more affordable and less intrusive. “There is a fantastic tension between individuals making decisions that make sense to them and how social media is creating a new norm of beauty,” Caulfield says. “There are people in their 20s and teens coming out for procedures. We don’t want to judge but we do want to explore why they are doing it.”
With so many people seeking fast and affordable cosmetic procedures, the market has also become flooded with many strange, unproven and unregulated anti-aging therapies. The series examines how many actually work. And if they do, asks Caulfield, “will they make you happier?”
Caulfield interviewed Alice Marwick, a social media researcher and assistant professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. Marwick says that today’s beauty standard is fuelled by celebrity culture and is based on an aesthetic that is almost impossible to achieve without plastic surgery. “For celebrities, it’s a full-time job to look beautiful,” she says. “You are comparing yourself to someone who has professional beauty experts and photographers at their disposal.” And even with such helpers on-hand, their images are still polished and perfected with tools like Photoshop. It’s no wonder that elective plastic surgery is a $20 billion global industry.
For the show’s second episode, Caulfield travelled to Seoul to discover the lengths that people will go in search of the fountain of youth (or at least the dermatologist’s clinic of youth). The South Korean capital is also the cosmetic surgery capital of the world. Caulfield walked through the consultation process to visualize what he might look like after cosmetic surgery. At the same time, he met with a traditional face reader who told him how his appearance affected the ways that other people reacted to him. For all the focus on the appeal of a youthful appearance, well-earned wrinkles also imply wisdom. Finding the balance is one of the challenges of the age.
A User’s Guide to Cheating Death from Peacock Alley Entertainment airs Mondays at 9 p.m. on VisionTV, available on Rogers channel 60, Bell channel 1161, Bell Fibe 1213 or check your local listings. Visit visiontv.ca/cheating-death for more information.
“The pressure to be youthful has never been stronger. I was stunned by how normalized cosmetic surgery has become.” – Timothy Caulfield