-by Frank Macdonald
Staying young, or trying to, is not a modern obsession.
As far back as 1513, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon tried to locate the Fountain of Youth. He looked in Florida. He never found the Fountain of Youth but people keep looking for it in Florida, just as they keep looking for the lost cities of gold.
The State of Florida has never really tried to discourage de Leon’s theory that the secret to eternal youth hides somewhere in that state. So its winter beaches fill up with people who are too old to be shovelling snow. The reality, though, is that not much about Florida is youthful, because its winter beaches fill up with retired, long-term visitors from northern places such as Canada.
Or used to, although lately elderly Canadians have been finding more ICE on those sandy shores than they will ever find in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Still, despite the risk of being arrested for having voted for Mark Carney, whom Donald Trump has added to his Hate List, a considerable number of Canadians bring their pensions and wrinkles to the February warmth of that state’s sun.
After weeks or months, they return no less recognizable than they were upon their departure. No one greets a parent at the Toronto airport asking, “Are you my mother or my sister?,” because a snowbird fell into the Fountain of Youth. They just say, “Mother, if you were any browner you would have gotten yourself arrested!”
My personal pursuit of the Fountain of Youth came to a screeching halt by the time I was 20, by which time I was bald, dentured, and deaf. In the years following high school, I zigzagged across the continent on the strength of my thumb but never for a moment entertained a thought about making Florida a destination. Oh, I knew about Juan Ponce de Leon and his quest for a mouthful of H2O from that fountain’s holy grail, but I also did the math. He died at age 47, an almost still youthful man. I found better things to spend my life searching for than a way to regain my hair.
It seems, from the several thousands of television advertisements I see, that it is the young who want most desperately to stay young. Oh sure, our generation had its moment of evoking the Fountain of Youth with hits such as Forever Young, Forever in Blue Jeans, and various other songs intended to keep away the grey.
I suppose that’s been an ongoing obsession since The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Who defines “young?” Fashion designers? Movie directors? Plastic surgeons?
I recall a long ago an issue of Playboy that featured “older women.”
I happened upon that feature because there was an article I wanted to read. Playboy’s informative, intelligent articles were the driving force behind men’s intellectual attraction to that magazine. But just to test a reader’s sincerity, the magazine contained more nude pin-ups than a factory lunchroom. This one issue in particular featured “older women.” A close examination of that edition found that these older women were aged between 24 and 31.
The cosmetic industry has created this creature called “aging,” while manufacturing all sorts of snake oils and creams to assure women, and men too, that “Wrinkles don’t need to happen to you!”
To whom?
A CBC program recently ran a piece covering an Italian government agency that is investigating global beauty brands Sephora and Benefit Cosmetics for allegedly trying to sell anti-aging treatments to children as young as 10. It accuses them of adopting an “insidious marketing strategy” fuelling minors with an “obsession with skincare.”
Considering this marketing insanity, if I was in the cosmetics industry, I would begin marketing those old-woman apple dolls with their shrivelled, wrinkled heads, to even younger children. The purchase would also include an array of creams and oils capable of turning those shrunken heads into Cinderella’s head. Or maybe Anne Boleyn’s. (Teach a bit of history along with wrinkle-free salves for eight-year-olds.)
The social message seems to be that if one keeps looking artificially young, then they will never need to grow old. Age, in our society, as it was in the days of Juan Ponce de Leon, is an evolutionary curse on the species that we need to bombard with jars and tubes of illusions.
And where do these fountains of youth come from? They do have a history of cruelty to animals which, as best I can research, is a diminishing practice among those marketing perpetual youth. But there are other questionable sources. I recall once watching an advertisement for the latest in wrinkle-shirking salves. It was touted as the “latest thing.”
My late wife, Virginia, told me during this particular television commercial, what she had heard on a CBC radio program. It was an interview about cosmetics. One popular wrinkle-reducing product that had recently arrived on cosmetic counters, according to the interviewee, was nothing more than hemorrhoid cream. Someone in the cosmetics industry realized that if the stuff would shrink hemorrhoids it should also be able to shrink facial wrinkles. An appealing scent was added, the price doubled, and the facial cream took off!
Ah, if only Ponce de Leon had known where to look for the Fountain of Youth, maybe he’d have gotten his head out of his scurvy-swollen bum and made himself a Fountain of Youth fortune.