If You Want to Spend $25K Per Year to “Look Younger,” That’s Fine
If you don’t, that’s fine too. It’s your body!
One of the strangest assumptions about adulthood is that, once you reach a certain age, change stops. Your personality is fixed, you’re going to have the same career and the same partner and the same interests, and your body is going to stay as close to your twenty-five-year-old self as possible, or you’re doing something wrong.
Now that I am on the other side of thirty-five, which makes me both approaching-middle-aged and still young enough to hit a “forty under 40” list, I have started to think of what my body is doing as, like, another puberty. We’ve been through this before, and we’ll do it again in another ten years if we’re lucky.
(“This,” in my case, means being really careful about sleep and what I eat—those Little Debbie cupcakes I bought on Sunday turned out to be a terrible idea, and I had indigestion all night long. “This” also means the conversation I had with my doctor after my last physical, in which he essentially told me that, although I’m physically active and am eating a healthy diet, I should still expect my body to naturally change shape—even if I maintain roughly the same weight—over time.)
But, as The Cut reports, it is possible to mitigate some of these changes if you have enough cash.
The Cut’s Linda Wells profiles “Christina,” a 51-year-old woman who spends $25,750 per year to reduce visible signs of age—and that figure doesn’t include the non-annual expenses, like the $7,600 Christina paid for lower-eyelid blepharoplasty when she was 43. ($1,600 of that $7,600 went towards a two-night stay at a “recovery hotel.”)
Before we all go read Christina’s itemized list of expenses and poke fun at them, I’ll freely admit that I also color my hair ($8 per month) and use plenty of drugstore-brand sunscreen moisturizers and fine-line-reducers ($15–20 per month), and although fine lines will eventually come for us all, I do believe that one of the reasons my skin looks as healthy as it does is because I started using Neutrogena Healthy Skin Anti-Wrinkle Cream With Sunscreen in my early 20s.
So what is this really but a matter of scale? (On the subject of scale, Christina paid $2,500 to lose eight pounds with the aid of a nutritionist.) I am not the kind of person who would ever inject “filler” into my smile lines, but I am definitely the kind of person who would pay for weekly Pilates and yoga classes like Christina does. When I lived in DC, I set my alarm for 5:45 a.m. so I could go to a daily Ashtanga class, and I’d do it again if there were one close by.
Yes, Christina’s anti-aging regimen seems a little extreme. But, like Megan wrote earlier this week: “Spend your money, save some money, live your life the way it needs to be lived for you.”
There’s no magic formula for financial independence. There’s also no magic formula that will keep us permanently wrinkle-free. Money—and youth—will be spent, and we’ll all have to deal in our own ways with both types of change.
