Photo Credit: people.com

About two-and-a-half years ago, I have posted an article on this blog lauding two luxury brands featuring older models – Joni Mitchell for Yves Saint Laurent and Joan Didion for Celine. The excitement about the then 71-year-old Mitchell and 80-year-old Didion emerging as the newest fashion faces generated a lot of buzz and attention in the media. I questioned at that time whether it was really a marketing campaign acknowledging diversification or just a promotional gimmick. It looks like the fashion and beauty industries are really waking up and embracing mature women and models.

Nobody made bigger news recently than iconic actresses Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren making their debut appearances on the fashion runway for LOreal during the Paris Fashion Week this year. The 79-year-old Fonda and 72-year-old Mirren have been trailblazers all their lives, and now they are brand ambassadors for a leading beauty and cosmetics brand. Fonda has always been comfortable in her own skin in spite of her age. In 2016, she told the Daily Mail that after she turned 60, she began to understand who she was and she became young again. She said she is feeling pretty good about life now that she is in sight of her 80th birthday. She repeated the same observations in a recent TV interview with Megyn Kelly on NBC.

These septuagenarian brand ambassadors are not the only ones walking the runway with the hottest young models such as Gigi Hadid. Last month,it was announced that Maye Musk, 69, was the new face of CoverGirl, making her one of the oldest ambassadors for the brand. Having been modelling since she was 15, Musk is, of course, no stranger to the world of beauty and fashion. What is noticeable is her continued success, as she ages, as a brand ambassador in an industry which has traditionally been perceived as skin-deep superficial. In an interview with Vogue last year, Musk said: I hope my success gives other women hope that they can look good and feel good when they are past 60. I was on a shoot yesterday, and the young models were so excited to see me because they say it gives them hope, too, that they can carry on.

The accomplishments of Musk are, of course, beyond the fashion runway and photo shoots. She is the mother of three successful adult children including Elon Musk, Founder, CEO and CTO of SpaceX and co-founder and CEO of Tesla Inc. This Regina-born grandmother, with 10 grandkids and also a successful business as a dietitian, perfectly exemplifies brains and timeless beauty.

The list of mature models does not stop here. Versace also featured former supermodels of the 1990s – Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen, Claudia Schiffer and Carla Bruni – in its latest runway show. These mature women walked the runway alongside the new guard, including the daughter of Crawford, Kaia Gerber, and the current reigning supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid.

Even Zara, the Spanish fast-fashion brand popular among young women around the world, is using three veteran models over 40 to showcase its new Timeless Fall and Winter Collection. In marketing campaign materials and on its website, the three beautiful women – Malgosia Bela (40), Yasmin Warsame (41) and Kristina de Connick (53) – discuss the effect of aging on their personal style. The ladies have collectively walked for Dior, Valentino, Givenchy and Dries van Noten.

Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, and Loewe have also followed suit in recent years, hiring older Hollywood stars, such as Vanessa Redgrave, Sophia Loren and Charlotte Rampling, as brand ambassadors. Age diversity seems to be increasingly in vogue now on fashion runways for the past few seasons: Amber Valleta walked the runway for Tom Ford; Stella Tennant for Ralph Lauren; and Carolyn Murphy for Michael Kors.

Perhaps everything old is really new again! As I have said before on this blog, the fashion and beauty industries are finally realizing that the consumers buying their products are no longer just spring chickens, but mature women with more disposable income. Let us hope that this awakening to the aging reality is not simply a fad and mature women and men will no longer become invisible as they age.

Everybody by now must know the benefits of leading a physically-active lifestyle. But it increasingly looks like exercise may even be the fountain of youth! According to The Globe and Mail, a new research indicated that exercise may prove to be the best-kept anti-aging secret for youthful skin.

As we age, the loss of structural support leads to deflation and the appearance of deep folds, wrinkles and jowls. Aging skin also becomes more coarse, dehydrated and lax. Researchers from McMaster University have found that in mice models, regular exercise has been shown to stave off and reverse the signs of early aging. As compared to sedentary mice, those given access to running wheels maintained healthier brains, hearts, muscles, reproductive organs and fur over a longer period of time. Also, the active mice’s fur did not grey and they did not develop furrows and wrinkles.

The McMaster researchers followed up their mice studies with a small human trial evaluating 29 subjects between ages 20 and 84 to compare those who were active – performing at least three hours of physical activity weekly – to those who were sedentary. Measurements of the skin in an unexposed area, the buttock, were also compared across groups.

While skin changes occurred with aging, the active subjects were found to have thinner stratum corneums and thicker dermis layers, with a more youthful skin composition regardless of age. The research group also showed that starting a new exercise program later in life results in rejuvenative changes to the skin as seen in those subjects who consistently partook in regular aerobic exercise.

Although this human study represented a very small sample, it supported past research that excercise benefits our skin. Exercise can also go a long way toward  “cleaning up” and toning our complexion. According to Dalton Wong, a celebrity trainer, engaging in the correct exercises will help us tone our skin in much the same  way we tone our muscles.

According to Wong, to improve your skin, you’ll want to focus on resistance training, where you’re using your own bodyweight to challenge your muscles. Lunges, pushups, and planking are  examples of resistance exercises. To tone both muscles and skin, and help eliminate cellulite, he recommends implementing a circuit routine consisting of  three to four sets of weight bearing exercises with two to four minutes of cardio  in between, repeated four times.

Wong warns that excessive cardio can actually cause your skin to lose its youthful elasticity, especially if you’re over- or underweight. One of the reasons for this is because the stress placed on your body when you’re running long distances produces excessive  amounts of cortisol, a stress hormone responsible for inflammation. This can  take a heavy toll on your skin, as cortisol tends to break down collagen, resulting in wrinkling and sagging.

So if you’re already moving, move more, but moderately. If you are a couch potato, it’s never too late to start moving now!

In London and Paris, more bankers and businessmen are queuing up for Botox treatments. Typically, a swift shot of the toxin which freezes muscles, targets the deep forehead cleft which can happen to men over 40, especially if they spend all day frowning at a screen. Other favoured treatments are lasers, which perk up skin-tone, and cosmetic fillers for those deep grooves between the nose and the mouth.  While the French male patients tag along with their wives, Englishmen tend to seek their cosmetic treatments alone.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Botox was used 336,834 times by American men in 2010, up nine percent from 2009. But women are still 15 times more likely than men to have their faces frozen.

Less invasive male maintenance is growing, too. Mintel, a market researcher, says sales of men’s beauty products in France, Germany, Spain, Britain and Italy rose by eight percent between 2005 and 2010, in spite of the recession, and will grow another eight percent by 2014. Moisturizers dominate in France, Britain and Spain, while Germans and Italians prefer deodorants.

According to The Globe and Mail, ageism in the workplace might have something to do with the increase in Canadian men seeking cosmetic treatments as a result of the recession. Vera V. Madison, a Toronto doctor of aesthetic medicine, estimated that the number of male patients she treated in her clinic increased in 2011 over the previous year by 40 to 50 percent. She said that men are not that different from women when it comes to looking good. When they look in the mirror, they don’t like to see wrinkles or droops or other kinds of changes in their appearance brought on by the aging process.

For many men, though, looking good isn’t just about vanity, but about excelling at or even keeping their jobs. Dr. Jean Carruthers, the Vancouver-based cosmetic surgeon who pioneered the use of Botox in beauty procedures, cites a male patient, a computer salesman, who says he can chart his sales according to the effectiveness of his treatments.

Apparently, looking good and less tired gives men an edge in the workplace and gives them the confidence to compete on a level-playing field. Sounds like men are increasingly insecure when it comes to aging and its impact on their jobs!

Dominique Browning said that her current rule of thumb, when confronted with an enhanced face, is that if she finds herself vaguely wondering whether there was work, the alteration was well done. But it’s the motivation for the cosmetic work that she’s questioning. “If you choose not to partake of the benefits of needle and knife, you are judged to be making a statement. You are taking a position against the current standards of beauty.”

She also argued that feminism has nothing to do with saying no to knife and needle. Feminists worry about why women still make only 77 cents to every dollar a man makes, not whether women are going broke on reducing wrinkles.

There are always two sides to the argument – why can’t we just ignore the signs of aging and just grow old naturally? Are we boomers in self-denial? And my answer is always this – like everything else, cosmetic work (both invasive and non-invasive) should be done in moderation. Why do it at all? Well, if this makes some boomer men and women happier and more comfortable with their self-images, why not? Look at these procedures like self-improvement solutions. If the modern-world technology is safe and fast and efficient, and you can afford it, then by all means make use of it and enjoy the benefits. But please bear in mind that defying physical aging is just unnatural, and a boomer with no wrinkles or facial expression is just fake, artificial and deceiving.

My experience is that a man or woman who constantly has cosmetic procedures done to such an extent that there are no laugh lines and no facial emotions, then he or she usually has a bigger self-esteem problem than just defying age. And for those patients who are putting their lives in danger by going through surgery without doing their research, they are just plain foolish. But when boomers are just undergoing cosmetic enhancements as moderate self-improvement solutions, then I don’t think people should make harsh judgements. After all, I’m sure even those who constantly go under the knife should realize that there’s something more important in life and human beings that are not related to physical appearance!