If you walk into any pharmacy, shopping mall, beauty salon, or department store, you're bound to come across a wide variety of anti-aging remedies. Magical creams and expensive overnight serums claiming to erase wrinkles, age spots, cellulite, and a plethora of other age-related skin normalcies. But what's all the fuss about aging, anyway? And what exactly are they putting in these products to make them so 'magical'?
We see it every year - more and more products are released into the stream of 'anti-aging' skin and body care, with no end in sight. We all have moments where we catch ourselves in the mirror and spot a new wrinkle, a new grey hair, or a particularly 'aged' section of skin, but what makes us look at these signs of our body's natural process and say, "this is not okay"?
Dealing with change is hard. And for women, it seems like it is never-ending. From birth, to childhood, to awkward pre-teen years, we're encouraged by friends and family to smile for the camera, brush our untamable hair, keep our faces clean, and put on a nice outfit. Sometimes it feels like it's our job to look pretty, always. We spend this period of our lives navigating sensitive bodily changes like budding breasts, adapting to monthly bleeding, and dealing with a roller coaster of hormones that seem to come and go as they please.
Then comes mid-life. Our friends (and sometimes ourselves) are most likely settling down with partners and children, we may experience a rollercoaster of weight gains and/or losses as we adapt to more hormonal and physical bodily changes, and we often start comparing ourselves to the younger generation of females who seem to have their seemingly perfect 'no-filter' faces (and bodies) plastered all over the internet. We used to only be subjected to the most popular models and actresses who would grace our TV screens, billboards, or magazines. Now, with the growing use (and borderline addiction) of technology, we are barraged on a daily basis by millions of young, trendy, and beautiful social media influencers on a variety of mediums - Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and just about every other technological avenue we utilize for both our personal and professional lives.
Once we sail past our mid-life crises and begin settling into our skin, so to speak, it becomes a little easier (for most, but not all) to finally feel comfortable with who we are, where our life choices have taken us, and we see more clearly where we're heading and what we really want to do with our own unique lives. And then another wave hits. We start noticing even more changes. Grey hairs start popping up, smile/frown lines develop, and we might be surprised by an age spot or two that didn't seem to be there yesterday. This incredibly liberating time of our life happens to be when we become the target audience for the yearly 63-billion-dollar-industry (that's over $84 billion CAD) that is known as 'anti-aging'.
So, how is it that we get pulled into thinking our beautiful, ever-changing bodies now need to be corrected, halted, and even reversed? That the natural passage of time is something to slow (or stop altogether), all in the name of beauty? How do we fix the narrative to start believing that aging skin IS beautiful skin, that our laugh lines and frown lines and whatever-lines are there for a reason, and that reason is to place a time stamp on everything we've experienced in life, which has brought us to where we are right now?
“Be bold in your beauty. Take a good look at yourself in the mirror and find a story in every freckle, every wrinkle, every scar. Your skin is a unique constellation created from life events, and is the only proof you need to show that you have truly lived. Continue to be the most beautiful thing in your life, and don't ever allow yourself to feel ashamed for the passage of time.”
Why you won't find any "anti-aging" products on our website
We've chosen to stray away from the path of 'anti-aging' remedies, as we truly think the term, along with most of the products, end up doing more harm than good. If you look at the ingredient list of the anti-aging products in your bathroom right now, you'd likely be surprised at some of the ingredients. Heck, we would be surprised if you could tell us what half of those ingredients actually were.
Like most conventional beauty products, anti-aging skincare products are riddled with impossible-to-pronounce ingredients, which usually means they are synthetically manufactured in a lab, and do some not-so-great things for our bodies (or our planet). But that's not all. We think it's important to ask ourselves - what is the purchasing of these products doing to our self-esteem? When we are constantly reaching for a magic time-machine-in-a-bottle to rid us of every sign of aging, what are we telling our bodies and minds? Do we really need to look ten years younger in order to feel great? Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could look in the mirror and think of all the amazing life events that brought us here, looking exactly this way, and reflect on how much we have grown, how much we have loved, and how much we still have to look forward to instead?
Flourish Apothecary of Victoria, BC is a woman-owned online herbal shop specializing in organic and wild-crafted natural health products. Each product is hand-crafted from freshly harvested medicinal herbs on Vancouver Island. We believe in planet before profit, and emphasize sustainable business practices to ensure we can deliver the highest-quality goods without having a negative affect on the planet.
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