Mirror, mirror on the wall

Sitting next to me at the anti-aging convention in Las Vegas was a smooth-faced honey blonde with taut cheeks and forehead, a firm chin and knife-sharp jawline, no nasal-labial lines, no lines anywhere and Angelina Jolie lips.  The convention is a huge event featuring three days of paper presentations and panels, and showcasing hundreds and hundreds of anti-aging products and services.  I was there to do “traditional” research for my book, Counterclockwise – taking notes at presentations, buttonholing experts, getting copies of papers.  But I was also there as a kind of cultural anthropologist observing this well developed, carefully crafted new culture of anti-aging enthusiasts.This woman sitting next to me in the cavernous conference hall could have been in her late twenties.  I watched her out of the corner of my eye.  She reached into her purse.  That’s weird, I thought.  Her hands were veiny and freckled with age spots.  This young woman somehow had the hands of a 60 year old.  It took me a moment to realize my error.  It’s the other way around: This 60-plus-year-old woman is wearing the face of a 25 year old.From her purse she pulled a pair of reading glasses, perched them on her perfect nose and squinted as she rummaged around in her purse until she found two small prescription pill bottles.  She set them on the table in front of her, and when she turned away to grab a water bottle, I sneaked a peek:  Lipitor. Atenolol.  Lipitor is the top cholesterol-lowering drug.    Atenolol is a beta blocker often prescribed to prevent second heart attacks.Living beneath this impressively wrinkle-free, youthful mask was a not-very-healthy older middle-aged woman with high cholesterol and heart disease.  She believed she’d turned back the clock because the mirror showed her a young face.  But actually, biologically turning back the clock is about becoming younger on the inside not the outside.  Slowing or reversing aging is not about surgery, or injectibles or fillers.  It’s about all the things we can do to sustain and regain the vitality and youthfulness of our hearts, lungs, arteries, brains, muscles.  It’s about recapturing, regaining and sustaining intellectual verve, creative vitality, a sense of adventure, a love of challenges and new things, curiosity, wonder, optimism.That’s what “anti-aging” is about.