In Our Prime (27 page)

The strength of the Midlife Industrial Complex derives primarily from the ability of the media and advertisers to set standards and manipulate
tastes. In 1873, the
Bazar Book of Decorum
declared: “
No devices to give a deceitful
appearance of youth can be justified by the sense of fitness and good taste.” But by the 1920s, women were embracing makeup to look youthful. Persistent marketing combined with glamorous images of penciled eyebrow arches and bee-stung lips that flickered from movie screens ultimately reversed the perception that middle-aged women should not use cosmetics to roll back the years.
Recall that Gertrude Atherton
, the author of
Black Oxen,
chastised the “fools” who refused to take advantage of science's marvels, saying they “deserve the worst that malignant Nature can inflict upon them.”

This was the same strategy Clairol and other companies used a couple of decades later to alter the disreputable taint associated with hair coloring. For most of history, as P. G. Wodehouse once observed, the only cure for gray hair was the guillotine. Clairol offered an alternative and employed a two-pronged campaign to convince women of its benefits. One aim was to send the message that coloring hair was socially acceptable. “
Nice women do color their hair
,” a 1943 Clairol ad declared. “Remember when rouge spelled ‘hussy,' when lipstick meant ‘brazen,' when nail polish branded you ‘common'?” An ad for Eternol Tint Oil Shampoo said, “Lipstick was once considered daring . . . so was tinting your hair.” Early Clairol advertisements offered Hollywood beauty secrets and endorsements by glamorous stars such as Joan Crawford.

The second prong was aimed at denigrating gray. “
Because of her prematurely
gray hair, Miss H was fast becoming known as ‘the old maid aunt' . . . at the age of 32!” Clairol grimly related in a 1943 ad. Then Miss H “Chases Gray Hair! . . . Joins Younger Crowd!” Advertisements did whatever they could to promote the notion that aging was regrettable and gray hair its stigmata. In the 1940s, Clairol ran a series of ads suggesting gray hair was the cause of a wide range of exclamation-pointed social failures: “UNPOPULAR!” “WALLFLOWER!” “LOSING FRIENDS!” “PITIED!” all followed by the parenthetical question “(because your hair is gray?).”

In 1956, when Clairol came
out with a new twenty-minute color treatment without peroxide, its memorable slogans—“Does she or doesn't she?”; “Is it true blondes have more fun?”; and “The closer he
gets, the better you look”—did much to dilute the disgrace and artificiality associated with hair dye. Instead of glamorous movie stars, advertisements featured unknown models who were supposed to resemble the slightly more attractive woman next door—someone like you. Without color photographs to remind us, we have forgotten that gray was the color of middle age before the mid-1950s. Previously, roughly seven percent of adult women over 40 dyed their hair. Now nearly seventy-five percent do.

Fifty years ago, Clairol aimed to alter the views of women. Today, advertisers are working to revise the perception of hair dye for men. Commercials seek to build positive associations by using athletes and sex symbols such as the actor Patrick Dempsey. In one Grecian Formula spot, a man gets a job after ridding his hair of gray.

Edward L. Bernays, who is credited with founding the public relations industry in the 1920s, brought extraordinary perceptiveness and creativity to the job of molding tastes. A nephew of Sigmund Freud, Bernays had an intimate connection with psychological theories about subliminal desire and persuasion. He worked on the Committee on Public Education during World War I, stoking popular support for military action, and at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, where the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He was impressed by the French people's responsiveness to pro-democracy slogans and recognized how susceptible the public was to manipulation. Like the adman Bruce Barton, Bernays was as much of a philosopher as a marketer. “
This is an age of mass production
,” Bernays wrote in a 1928 article, “Manipulating Public Opinion.” “In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.” But while Barton saw marketing as an engine of democracy, Bernays was an unapologetic elitist with a dim view of the general public. He believed a small group of elites, the “intelligent few,” were necessary to oversee opinion-making in a democratic society.
The new class of
public relations professionals would use the principles of psychology, economics, and sociology to oversee “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses” for the overall good. It was the only way to get “vast numbers
of human beings” to cooperate in a “smoothly functioning society” and enjoy continued economic prosperity.
In his book
Propaganda,
Bernays explained that it was impossible for each person to individually investigate every political, economic, and ethical issue or test every product in the market. Instead, we have agreed to let an “invisible government” do it for us. From our leaders—be they essayists, teachers, ministers, or “prevailing opinion”—“we accept a standardized code of social conduct, to which we conform most of the time,” just as factory workers were expected to conform to Taylorized standards. Bernays's views were widely adopted by the industry.
As one trade press
put it: “Those in control
can
improve the taste of the mob.”

When George Washington Hill
, the president of the American Tobacco Company, discovered that women weren't buying Lucky Strikes in the early 1930s, he called Bernays. Women told surveyors that the cigarette's dark green packaging clashed with their outfits, but having spent millions branding Lucky's green design, Hill was not about to switch to a different one. Bernays's response? “If you won't change the color of the package, change the color of fashion—to green.” And so he did, organizing a Green Ball in 1934 with a society figure who commissioned Paris fashion designers to create emerald-colored gowns. He put together a Color Fashion Bureau that fed stories to the press about the new green trend, and sponsored a Green Fashions luncheon for fashion editors, with art and psychology experts to expound on the significance of the color.

Bernays understood how effectively marketing could guide opinions about what is normal, rude, desirable, or deviant. Ads can exploit longstanding urges (the quest for youth), establish new ones (being hip), and fan free-floating worries, impressions, and biases (do I look too old to get this job?). They can make a commonplace item seem outdated and turn disdain into desire. Objects, even trivial ones, are animated with meaning. Marketers provide the narratives. They create fairy tales, in which a flask of hair tonic or a bowl of oat bran functions as a handful of magic beans; and cautionary fables, in which the failure to use a stick of deodorant or a teeth whitener loses you the girl, the job of your dreams, and the approval of your friends. Science makes magical transformation
possible. The modern marketplace expanded from quantifiable materials and services to intangibles like beauty, confidence, and social conscience until desire and imagination supplanted necessity as the mother of invention.

The consultant Paco Underhill describes
shopping as “a method of becoming a newer, perhaps even slightly improved person. The products you buy turn you into that other, idealized version of yourself: That dress makes you beautiful, this lipstick makes you kissable, that lamp turns your house into an elegant showplace.”

In moderation, the power of consumption to enrich daily comfort and sensibility is one of the great luxuries capitalism provides. Yet there is a danger in infusing products with too much meaning.
In his classic 1979 critique
The Culture of Narcissism,
Christopher Lasch perceptively argued that consumers want “to find a meaning in life,” and advertising “upholds consumption as the answer to the age-old discontents of loneliness, sickness, weariness, lack of sexual satisfaction.” Sixties radicals expressed a rebellious individualism by buying mass-produced goods, and in the nineties “
Bourgeois Bohemians” flaunted
a commitment to environmental sustainability—“conspicuous conservation”—by buying expensive products with ecofriendly labels.

The middle-aged version combines happiness with virtue. This connection is one that surfaced when college graduates talked to MIDUS researchers about social responsibility, mentioning that taking care of themselves was a prerequisite for taking care of others. Taking responsibility for personal health should be vigorously encouraged, but the Midlife Industrial Complex transforms this impulse into anxiety about aging. Responding to the pressure to mask signs of middle age and look more youthful is cast as a civic obligation, as when Rubenstein scolded women for being lazy if they did not utilize the market's bounty to make themselves beautiful.

Consumption as activism has obvious appeal. For one, it infuses our daily transactions with meaning, elevating them above the narcissistic function that Lasch excoriated. It also satisfies a fundamental need: the very act of buying can give people a sense of control, not only because financial resources are a tangible buffer against bad fortune but because it
can create the illusion of potency. Even if the wrinkle cream doesn't work or the drooping stomach remains under the camouflage of clothing, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing you took action instead of sitting passively, listening to the clock tick. As MIDUS studies demonstrated, a feeling of control is both a source of satisfaction and a spur to improve your health.

Middle age is hardly the first vehicle that marketers have used to turn happiness, respect, youth, and self-confidence into commodities. But the number and power of the generation who currently occupy this tier have given midlife's consuming desire a new prominence and influence. Products and procedures that once lay outside the glossy ring of everyday consumption have been pulled inside. Many surgeons and clients consider plastic surgery a kin of any other luxury commodity available to aspiring Americans.
One Beverly Hills
plastic surgeon recounted, “One of my patients said: ‘I financed my car. Why shouldn't I finance my face?' . . . Plastic surgery is another high-ticket item you put on credit and pay for later.” Among their clients are working-class people who would not have considered such expensive treatments without the lure of easy loans. (“Don't wait to enjoy the benefits of plastic surgery,” one website urged. “You can qualify for a loan in as little as 30 seconds.”) After the financial crisis tightened credit, some surgeons offered layaway plans.

Reality makeover shows normalize the idea of plastic surgery and other extreme cosmetic treatments in the pursuit of a youthful appearance.
The overwhelming majority of American
women, seventy percent, say they would never consider plastic surgery. That figure seems surprising given the operation's ubiquity on-screen.
Four out of five
patients who went under the knife said they had been “directly influenced to have a procedure by the plastic surgery reality-television shows they watch.” Although viewers see the bandaged, pained expressions of patients, the brief summary of their recovery (followed by further alterations effected through makeup and clothes) minimizes the surgical risks. A perfectly sculpted middle age, no matter the physical, financial, and emotional price, is promoted as a universal dream.

Plastic surgery, an expensive luxury, bounced back during the
recession, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. The number of operations grew to 1.6 million in 2010, a hike of nearly nine percent in one year.
Newer nonsurgical treatments
, including Botox and facial fillers, are far more popular, although they were more affected by the economic downturn. The number of these procedures dropped by nearly nine percent to 9.5 million in 2010. (Although the percentage of male customers has been growing, men still accounted for fewer than one in ten procedures.) Altogether, Americans, most of them middle-aged, spent nearly $10.7 billion on cosmetic procedures.

Companies that manufacture these pharmaceutical products, not to mention over-the-counter cosmetics, invest millions of dollars to convince people that wrinkles and sagging skin, like nearsightedness or a chipped tooth, should be treated or repaired as a matter of course.
High-end sports clubs
have cosmetic dermatologists on staff to suggest laser facials and injections to clients. “You do your hair, right?” a doctor at a day spa asks. “Why wouldn't you do your face?”

Botulinum toxin type A, more commonly known by its brand names Botox and Dysport, is a neurotoxin that eliminates lines by temporarily interrupting the connection between the nerves and muscles. It is the number one minimally invasive cosmetic procedure in the country. The widespread use among actors over 35 has directors bemoaning the eerie absence of facial expressiveness.
More troubling is a 2011 study
that found Botox reduces a person's ability to empathize with others because it erases the ability to mimic facial expressions.

For Allergan, the manufacturer of the biggest seller, Botox, middle age has proved to be an enormous marketing opportunity. Originally created to treat strabismus, a condition in which the eyes are not properly aligned, Botox was first used in the mid-1990s to paralyze facial muscles, even before the FDA formally approved it for cosmetic use in 2002.
Since then, purchases
of the injectable have leaped up year after year with total net sales expected to pass $1.5 billion in 2011. More than a name, the brand has become a signifier for a lifestyle and an attitude. Allergan was eager to repeat its success with a product it introduced in 2008, Juvéderm, an injectable hyaluronic acid used to fill in or plump out lines and
wrinkles. Its ad campaign serves as a case study of how a company goes about redefining the look of middle age.