Our story begins as many unfortunate ones do, on a sticky and slightly drunken night in Revs. But rather than copping off with someone unsuitable, or having a not-so-tactical chunder, my night culminated with me, horrified, in front of the mirrors. Maybe it was the lucid lighting, or a few hours on a hot dancefloor with Grease Medley blaring, but I could have sworn that my face looked wrinkled. The more I squinted to see more closely, the more I was acutely aware of the lines running parallel on my forehead, the early whisper of creases at the corners of my eyes.

“Perhaps we all have a bit of a terrified Dorian in us, willing our faces not to sag and our hair not to turn silver”

Now, I’m aware of the ridiculousness of my drunken dismay. I am twenty-one; I sometimes get lines on my forehead if I concentrate for a while, and no one looks their best at 2am on a Wednesday night. However, I don’t think an occasional, startling fear of my body becoming older is all that uncommon or necessarily new. After all, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published before the 20th century had even begun, revolves around this obsessive dismay about ageing.

Perhaps we all have a bit of a terrified Dorian in us, willing our faces not to sag and our hair not to turn silver. He is there when I meticulously pluck out a grey hair in the mirror. He appears when I religiously apply SPF 50 to my face every morning to ward away any chance of the years making their mark on my skin (although I stand by this for skin cancer prevention purposes). But when I’m standing in front of a greasy mirror in a Cambridge club in a state of horror, I have to ask myself: why am I so scared?

The currency of youth is not something new, but it’s one with a much greater exchange rate than ever before. A multimillion-dollar industry depends on our inner Dorian and our abhorrence at any sign of age. Social media sites such as TikTok present us with a million ways to improve ourselves, inside and out, and skincare is just one part of this picture. Algorithms provide us with a positive feedback loop for any insecurity that we might have, presenting a myriad of methods and products to cure us.

Of course, in marketing terms, this is incredibly useful. Seemingly innocent recommendations of retinols and collagen creams can quickly turn into LED light face masks, skin patches, and even mouth tape to maintain a taut, youthful glow. “Baby Botox” is credited with reducing wrinkles at a lower price before they even fully form, especially on areas like the forehead. While anti-ageing marketing isn’t novel, the point at which we’re encouraged to freeze time is getting earlier and earlier. A search for “anti ageing product” on TikTok will suggest the suffixes ‘in your 20s’ and ‘for teens’ before ‘for 50s’. While this may be explained in part by the platform’s younger audience, this leads one to wonder why anti-ageing products are increasingly ubiquitous to its skincare content.

“Algorithms provide us with a positive feedback loop for any insecurity that we might have”

The increasingly young age that we are being targeted skincare content at hasn’t been received completely uncritically. For every post touting the benefits of snail mucus cream (it’s a real thing, I swear) there are people who oppose the notion that they must shun the sun in order to maintain a “glass skin” appearance. It’s also impossible to ignore the gendered element of a lot of anti-ageing content, often created by and positioned towards women. While this is not exclusively the case, in a patriarchal society, women are traditionally confronted with the threat of invisibility and lack of desirability as they age.

For women who date men the situation seems particularly dire. Dating website co-founder Christian Rudder used data to show what ages people said they were most attracted to. Whilst women’s preferred age tended to increase as they did, men of all ages consistently cited women in their early 20s as most attractive. Perhaps this is one indication as to why our culture is obsessed with women and feminine-presenting people fighting what is a natural process.

If I’m honest I find the whole thing quite tiring. I don’t want to worry about whether I will have deeper lines on my forehead in a year, and I don’t want to spend hours and pounds trying to slow down the inevitable. We have a choice as to whether we buy into the anti-ageing industrial complex: the more scary anti-wrinkle facial patches we buy, the more we endorse the notion that age is something undesirable.

I’m not perfect in this respect, and I’m sure in the years to come I will cave and purchase a few overpriced skincare products in medicinal looking packaging. However, I will not be wasting any more precious time worrying about lines on my forehead at Rumboogie.