When Nora Ephron wrote the words “I feel bad about my neck” it was a rallying cry for women everywhere. Yes, they thought. Finally! A woman widely considered an intellectual had come clean about the fact that no matter your deep and worldly concerns, your keen understanding of the beauty industrial complex’s choke hold, or your desire to be free of it, you will—at some point or another—realize that you are aging, and you won’t like it. Nora was a beloved friend and mentor, but it took me a long time to understand what she was talking about.
I have been test-driving beauty trends at Vogue for over a decade. In my tenure I’ve done everything from microblading to lash extensions, red lipstick to red hair, tooth whitening to mob-wife nails—and even a foray into the Gen Z trend of face glazing. Some have been informative (wow, tooth whitening isn’t as cut-and-dried as I’d thought) and others life-changing (my microbladed brows won friends and influenced people, and my face remains glazed), but none threw me into an existential tailspin quite like this assignment on face tape—how suddenly you can hardly open a social media app without being offered some form of tape that is not Scotch or duct, but is instead meant to delay the inevitable, to offer you sweet sleep that will leave you bright-eyed and youthful, or even rejigger your visage before your very eyes.
Fear of aging is, after all, about more than just the resultant wrinkles, the sagging in places you never knew could sag, the literal thinning of your skin. It’s about more than libido waxing and waning, or your role as an object of desire moving—at least in certain settings—to the background, as your crone status takes foreground (crone, a word that feminism tried to reclaim but could not give a proper makeover). We fear aging because we fear death, and we fear death because we don’t understand it. And so we control what we can—some of us exfoliate and slap on serums, others exercise until our muscles burn. We dye our hair and divvy up our food into smaller and smaller portions. Unless we make the decision to age with radical acceptance—a practice that offers few mainstream role models, existing as we do in a culture that celebrates women for doing things as basic as letting their curls spring into gray around their deep-plane facelifts. To see a woman going gently into that good night without any intervention, you may have to hop a plane to an organic farm in the Pacific Northwest.
My editors at Vogue started me with a range of tapes, more than any one woman could reasonably use—so many that I had to outsource testing to the girls in my office. The mouth tape—a TikTok trend run amok as far as I was concerned, intended to promote better sleep by forcing you to breathe through your nose—lasted about a half hour before I ripped it off, desperate to tell my husband something of absolutely no consequence. It was as if by taping my mouth, I was suddenly powerfully moved to speak gibberish. So I offered two kinds to my assistant Mia—VIO2 Unscented Mouth Tape, a clinical blue strip shaped like a T-bar, and Skin Gym’s millennial pink offering, molded into a cheeky kiss. Mia swore it caused her to drift off faster than she could say “I have something to tell you,” but later admitted she always sleeps like a baby. Ah, to be 28 again.
#Face #Tape #Secret #Eternal #Youth
