What Is Skin Longevity, and Why Is Gen X Embracing It?

When 53-year-old Ann Shoket thinks about the word “anti-aging,” she grimaces. 

“I imagine my mother standing in the mirror, taping her chin and pulling her skin back… to imagine what it would look like if she had gotten a facelift,” Shoket tells Flow Space. 

Shoket, the former editor-in-chief of the iconic teen magazine Seventeen and now founder of TheLi.st, a professional community for women stepping into their power, wants nothing to do with the term. And she’s not alone. 

After all, the allure of anti-aging as a beauty standard doesn’t resonate with the women who—well—are aging. “If you’re alive, you’re aging,” says Jeanette Leardi, social gerontologist and author of AGING SIDEWAYS: Changing Our Perspectives on Getting Older. “I mean, the alternative is, if you’re not aging, you’re dead.” 

It’s that simple truth that resonates with a growing number of women who want to define aging and beauty on their own terms. 

In 2017, Allure editor-in-chief and long-time beauty journalist Michelle Lee ran a cover of Oscar-winning Helen Mirren and declared “The End of Anti-Aging.” 

“We have to stop this negative perception that we become ‘over the hill’ at a certain age, and that signs of aging are things that need to be destroyed,” she reflects to Flow Space on the decision to abandon the term in her magazine. “Our ultimate message was: you do you. You shouldn’t feel pressured to do any beauty treatment or use any product because society makes you feel ugly if you don’t.” 

Since then, many Gen X public figures have denounced the term. Actress Brooke Shields does so by stating plainly the pressures of growing old in a culture that glorifies youth in her recent book, Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Aging as a Woman. At the same time, talk show host Drew Barrymore exclaimed, “I just wanted to never be afraid of what life would do to me.” As for Mirren, wrinkles are wisdom, and the actress has publicly exclaimed that anti-aging “pisses me off.” 

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Over 35 million women are in Generation X, and the number of Gen Xers will outnumber Baby Boomers before the turn of the decade. An increasing number of Gen X women, many of whom are in leadership positions at work, are also in the sandwich generation, caring for both a child and an aging parent. These women are in positions of power and responsibility, leading families and businesses; but like the generations before them, they remain susceptible to a toxic combination of ageism and sexism that punishes them for looking and being older. 

tPretending that women will reject beauty products and stop caring what they look like is naive—and besides the point. In fact, 75% of Gen Xers see buying beauty products as a great way to treat themselves, with some saying they do so for their health, according to a survey conducted by Women’s Wear Daily. It’s representative of a wave of voices denouncing anti-aging rhetoric—where many from Hollywood and beyond are redefining beauty, including prioritizing their skin health in the name of vitality versus the fear of fine lines. 

The shift has led to a proliferation of doctors, advocates, and journalists alike embracing a new phrase encapsulating the intersection of health, beauty, and aging more realistically: Skin longevity.

A History of ‘Anti-Aging’ 

The glorification of youth has been omnipresent for millennia. Even long-standing legends say Cleopatra famously bathed in milk water to soften her skin into more of a baby’s face. 

In the dawn of the 20th Century, women were put on a pedestal for looking fertile and dressing for the male gaze, explains Kari Molvar, a writer covering the beauty industry in New York City and author of The New Beauty: A Modern Look at Beauty, Culture, and Fashion. Then came the mass market of cosmetics in the 1930s and beyond. 

“A whole boutique industry kind of crops up to have products that can solve these ‘problems’ of women,” Molvar says, of when the term “anti-aging” really took its place in the public zeitgeist. “All the ideals that were highlighted then had to do with being fertile and youthful and able to produce children and heirs, and that was what was coveted.” 

In the 1940s and 50s, numerous ads from companies making products and promises they couldn’t keep claimed that women’s age lines must go. “It was all about smoothing away the wrinkles, looking perfect, and never showing that you put any effort into taking care of your appearance,” Molvar tells Flow Space, noting the ads were often generated by men. “There are just so many things that are naturally part of the aging process and just biology in general, that women were sort of told that they had to mask or minimize.” 

The beauty industry successfully capitalized on women’s insecurities, perpetuated by an unrealistic ideal to maintain a youthful appearance and “glow” associated with fertility.. “On its face, what we are teaching people is to be afraid of aging, to see it as something we want to avoid,” says Tracey Gendron, a gerontologist, chair of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Gerontology, and author of Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It. “It’s all about the fight, the battle, and the war against aging.”

Everyone alive is losing that war. 

The notion of anti-aging took a more scientific turn in the 90s and early 2000s, when the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine launched and the novel field of biogerontology began researching the cellular processes of aging and the intersection of lifestyle and aging. Since then, research has revealed how controllable lifestyle factors like nutrition, exercise, and social connection play a role in how well we age, from a holistic health perspective. At the same time, “anti-aging” rhetoric around beauty and appearance is not resonating with Gen X the way it may have with previous generations.

“So much of what we’re talking about is creating new possibilities in the world for women at any age, rather than trying to box us into some idea of how gorgeous our skin looked when we were 25 years old,” Shoket says. “That is not the vibe that I am seeing for women who have spent their entire careers trying to build a name for themselves, build authority in their field, and build careers and families that are meaningful.”

Like Lee, Shoket has had a unique window into the style and beauty trends shaping the way women feel about themselves. At the corner office of Seventeen from 2007 to 2015, she aimed to broaden the concept of beauty and boost women’s confidence. A decade later, she has the same message for the Millennials and Gen Xers who used to read her magazine for guidance. 

“The idea that we should go back to some very narrow, imaginary, unreachable target is just not what I see happening in the most powerful women that I know,” Shoket says. 

It’s evident in actress Tracee Ellis Ross saying aging is an “honor,” while Oprah Winfrey says aging well is about “feeling fit and strong—emotionally and physically.” 

And yet, nearly eight years after Lee denounced the term on the cover of Allure, the anti-aging products marketplace—an over $50 billion industry as of 2024, according to one research firm—is still booming. 

When Lee committed to abandoning the term anti-aging, she wasn’t blind to the nuance in her decision. Several brands had reached out to her, saying “they never liked the term” and “would love to commit to eliminating it moving forward.” Whether that commitment stands is unclear. Others critiqued the magazine for still promoting skin care products and treatments. (To which she says, “that was never the point! I mean, we’re beauty editors and of course we love beauty.”)

Still, it was a decision Lee fervently stands by. The goal was not to shame women for caring about beauty, but rather, to champion their intrinsic motivation to care for themselves as a part of their whole health. 

Perhaps that’s where we’re seeing the progress. After all, in the last two years, the intersection of beauty, health, and wellness has never been more pronounced. 

Where Longevity Meets Beauty 

In the meantime, Gen X women are putting their foot down and imagining an industry that celebrates aging. It starts with social rhetoric, which Shoket says “changes the goal.” 

“Longevity is something that we’re thinking about in all areas of our lives,” Shoket says, whether in our careers, health, or families. “The idea that your skin is just another piece of your health, in the same way that we’re thinking about sleep … all of these ladder up to stay connected longer and vital longer, and happier longer.”

Dr. Zakia Rahman, a clinical professor of dermatology at Stanford School of Medicine and faculty member at the Stanford Center on Longevity, reframes this desire for healthy skin as a nod to vitality and happiness over vanity. There’s no wishful thinking that our society will stop idealizing appearance, but framing and intrinsic motivation matter.  

“The skin is the organ that we can see that reflects how we feel on the inside. And I think a lot of my patients want to look like they feel when they’ve had a great night’s sleep or they’ve had a vacation,” Rahman says, adding that caring about skin health is not a “vanity game.” “It’s the external marker of what’s happening inside.”

Rahman defines skin longevity as having optimal functioning of the integumentary system, which encompasses the skin, hair, and nails, and is responsible for regulating key functions like body temperature and Vitamin D synthesis. While anti-aging focuses on achieving a younger appearance, skin longevity emphasizes that prioritizing healthy skin does more than just give you an outward glow. 

“People may externally see the appearance, but what’s happening at the cellular level and the biological level is like improved functioning,” Rahman says. 

Even in the last year, she’s noticed a dramatic increase in the term in publications. OneSkin, a beauty and skin-care brand that uses peptides to target the skin’s cellular health, has raised $20 million to place it as a major player in not only the skincare marketplace but the skin span longevity ecosystem. The beauty powerhouse Estee Lauder even has a Skin Longevity Institute. 

As the largest organ in the body, the skin serves as your body’s first line of defense. It’s a protective barrier that plays a role in immune function, Vitamin D absorption, strength, and temperature regulation. For one, ultraviolet light can suppress the immune system, Rahman says. And, “when your skin is more frail, it’s more prone to tears, and so it’s more prone to getting infections or a collection of blood underneath the skin,” Rahman says. “People who come in and have anxiety about aging and feel bad about it, I have an opportunity to help shift their focus and their view on it, to let them know that there are things they can do to improve the functioning of their skin.”

As a gerontologist, Gendron sees the distinction clearly: “Your skin health is important. Your wrinkles are not so important.”

Rahman’s team at Stanford is actively studying how optimal skin health translates to the body’s system internally, like cardiovascular health. She’s also investigating whether skin frailty is an indicator of risk for osteoporosis or even poor brain health. 

However, gerontologists and scholars underscore that changing thinking patterns and business marketing takes more than a name shift—it takes a cultural reckoning that finally stops idealizing the fountain of youth and allows people to look forward to the beauties of aging. Lee is the first to admit it. 

“No one ever thought that banning ‘anti-aging’ would be the magic bullet that would suddenly make negative stereotypes about aging disappear,” Leevy says. “But bigger picture, I do believe that words matter.” Just imagine young girls hearing the term “skin longevity” instead of “anti-aging,” growing up free of the fear of growing older. 

“What is beauty anyway? Can you be a beautiful old lady with a lot of wrinkles? Is it possible to be seen as beautiful that way?” says Leardi. “If we define beauty as youth, then we’re all sunk, because we’re all going to be getting older. But if we define beauty as coming into your own, being your authentic self, doing whatever you need to do to be more of who you want to be, then we can all accept that.”

What’s more, extensive research from Becca Levy, PhD, a professor of the psychology of aging at Yale University, has found that positive perceptions of aging correlate to another seven and a half years of life. So as it turns out, battling aging may do the opposite of what was intended. 

While the marketplace hasn’t caught up, many are vocal about denouncing rhetoric that shames older women with the hopes that, one day, everyone will catch on. 

“I turned 50 this year, and I have white hairs sprouting up,” Lee says. “I had this gut reaction, and wanted to cover them up. But then I thought, why?”