Rationales for Anti-aging Activities in Middle Age: Aging, Health, or Appearance?

We explore the motivations of middle-aged consumers of anti-aging products and services in relation to aging, health, and appearance. Admission of use of anti-aging products and services could align a respondent with a stigmatized group, old people, and also connotes a feminine concern with aesthetics. For these reasons, people, particularly men, will be unlikely to report using them for this purpose.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted among 19 men and women aged 42-61 years. Topics included their perceptions of bodily changes and their responses to these. We analyzed data qualitatively.

Respondents frame their uses of anti-aging products in terms of health and appearance, not anti-aging per se. Both men and women see anti-aging as related to beautiful appearance and thus as a feminized activity. Both are concerned about appearance, but in gendered ways. Overall, respondents conflate bodily appearance, health, and aging in their constructions of anti-aging.

This conflation maintains inequality by stigmatizing old age as unhealthy and unseemly. Our results point to the limits of studying the consumption of anti-aging products and services if researchers ask only about anti-aging uses per se. They also point to the ways that discourses of health and appearance naturalize ageism, as they suggest that old age inheres in bodies that "naturally" decline and thus should be excluded.