sin, salvation, and Sephora kids
confusing our skin with our souls
“If you told me that I literally had to eat poop every single day and I would look younger, I might. I just might,” Kim Kardashian, 43, told the New York Times in a 2022 interview about the release of her new $630 skincare line, SKKN by Kim.
Of course, Kim Kardashian does a lot of things most of us wouldn’t do. But this time, I think she might be the only person shameless enough to admit what many Americans feel. In 2023, almost five million Americans paid for injections of botulinum toxin, a drug we’ve nicknamed Botox, which smooths out wrinkles by paralyzing facial muscles.1 One research group estimates that the American anti-aging market was worth $64 billion in 2022, and expects it to reach $121.48 billion by 2032. So perhaps the average American isn’t lining up to eat poop—but they would take extreme and maybe irrational measures to look younger.
My generation, Gen Z, believes that we’re “aging like milk,” with twenty and thirty year olds already spending thousands on procedures like Botox. In 2020, 19% of Botox injections were performed on women under 40, ”and a startling 12,000 of those procedures are in girls ages 13 to 19.” We’re freezing our faces before we even get wrinkles, believing that “this is the most beautiful I’ll ever be, so I have to hold myself in place.”2 The irony is that long-term use of Botox—decades of paralyzing facial muscles—can actually cause skin to sag. “Preventative Botox” is a brilliant marketing scheme that launches girls onto a “treadmill of expensive treatments.” They’ll spend the rest of their lives chasing the youth they never enjoyed.
Maybe Gen Z really is aging faster than older generations. Maybe the internet has just oversaturated us with images of ageless, poreless, scarless, glass-skinned celebrities. Maybe it’s because we’ve seen so many filtered images of ourselves. Or maybe if this is how every generation before us felt too. Regardless, it’s clear that my generation—the generation that can’t afford to grow up—is terrified of aging.
And the generation below mine, Gen Alpha, is scared too. The biggest trend among today’s teens and tweens is skincare. (My fourteen year old sister was literally at Ulta while I wrote this piece). A lot of internet users defend “Sephora Kids” as just a harmless fad, but it’s bizarre that little girls are obsessed with high-end skincare products that used to be specifically targeted for older women. Today’s kids are worried about aging before they even grow up.
Why are we like this? Here’s my take: we’re afraid of looking old because we’re afraid of sin.
In his 1904 work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber proposed that “because worldly success could be interpreted as a sign of eternal salvation, it was vigorously pursued” by a number of protestant groups. Basically, people believed that prosperity was evidence that God had completely forgiven you for your sins, you were morally pure—righteous, even—and you were going to heaven.
But nobody wants to look like they’re going to hell, so everyone worked really hard to appear forgiven and sinless. Eventually Western society focused on the evidence more than the reality, and started seeking prosperity—not salvation. Europe began to operate as if you could earn forgiveness and innocence by being successful, totally forgetting that God was the only one who could actually forgive sin.
Members of those protestant groups worked obsessively to appear prosperous and therefore righteous and blessed, creating an attitude known as the “Protestant work ethic”—which Weber credits with catalyzing European capitalism.
And even if most Americans today would never say that they’re pursuing evidence of God’s salvation, we’re still functioning from this worldview. We still conflate prosperity, goodness, and our appearances. We worship authentic, wholesome “natural” beauty, shaming Kylie Jenner’s obviously manufactured face while celebrating Jennifer Lawrence’s post-pregnancy glow-up. But the more effortless beauty is, the more wealth is implied. As they say on social media, “you’re not ugly, you’re just poor.” Celebrities aren’t that much more beautiful than the average person, they’re just able to afford the products, surgeries, services, and lifestyle necessary to become gods and goddesses. The “clean girl” aesthetic and the entire genre of skin-care-collection instagram posts exist because our skin care routines prove we live elegant, organized, stable lives.
Skin care was never about health. (You don’t have a spleen care routine, do you?) We just want to look innocent, pure, joyful, blessed. Beauty means wealth, so dewy is our version of righteous and flawless is our idea of salvation.
We’re terrified of aging because it is evidence that we aren't innocent and immortal anymore. Our aging bodies reveal our secret: we have sinned. Christians believe that when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, sin entered the world—and death came with it. God tells Adam that he came from dust and to the dust he will return; as soon as Adam and Eve lose the Garden of Eden, their bodies begin to fall apart and decay.
And even if most Americans don’t believe this story, the beauty industry exists because we’re all trying to prove that it never happened. The anti-aging market in particular is built on our need to reverse the inevitable. One anti-aging product offers to “promote cellular repair, tighten and firm skin, reduce wrinkles and fine lines, soothe irritation, regulate oil production, restore and improve elasticity, boost collagen production.” Another product promises that women3 can “age well with this routine to cleanse, diminish fine lines, plump, and lift. These promises are pretty typical of anti-aging products, and ultimately they’re all about restoring skin to a tighter, healthier, smoother, more normalized state. We want to look too hydrated to return to the dust.
Anti-aging advertisements often use the language of fighting: fighting oxidation, fighting aging, fighting fine lines and wrinkles. My first google result for “best anti-aging products,” is a $124 kit “with clinically proven ingredients that fight dullness, bumps & signs of aging.” Advertisements refer to “the battle against aging” and offer to “reverse the face of time,” because really anti-aging is about women at war against the relentless march of death. Women are standing at their bathroom counters armed with retinol or collagen or vitamin E, rubbing in a barricade against death and massaging away his inevitable arrival.
Something I find really fascinating is that Renaissance artists often only give Eve body hair when portraying her after the fall. Compare Albrecht Dürer’s Adam and Eve to the postlapsarian Ghent Altarpiece by Van Eyck. And maybe women’s body hair is more socially acceptable today,4 but when you look at women’s bodies in advertisements, you still see Eve before the Fall. The Beauty industry shows you a toned, hairless, ageless woman who hasn’t sinned, who doesn’t have pain in childbirth, whose body isn’t already beginning to slump into the dust. She’s healthy and perfect— “and you should be too,” advertisements whisper. “You’re decaying because there’s something wrong with you.”
This is why aging has so much power to make us live in fear and shame: it’s evidence that we’re sinners. We’re not just getting older, we’re dying. Americans act as if gray hair is life force fading away from our heads, cellulite is death rippling across our thighs, and wrinkles are the accumulating scars of every day we’ve spent on this earth doing evil. We treat aging as the first symptom of death—and if death is the end, what hope do we have?
The good news is that although our modern perspective on aging is related to Christianity, the theology is completely incorrect.
In John 16:33, Jesus tells his followers, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” He promises us struggles, not dewy skin. Followers of Jesus have a peace and joy that nothing else in the world could offer—but the idea that prosperity is evidence of salvation is just wrong. Jesus told his followers, “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” In Phillipians 4:12-13, the apostle Paul wrote, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do all this through him who gives me strength.” Throughout the New Testament, the early Christians weren’t getting facials and living in penthouses—they were imprisoned and martyred for what they believed.
Following Jesus doesn’t mean we’ll be beautiful: it means that we don’t have to be. The Bible is clear that you don’t have to be perfect and innocent. We’ve all sinned. We’re all ugly inside. Only Jesus was perfect, and his death paid for our sin—but death has no claim on the one who has never sinned. And if you believe that Jesus was the perfect Son of God who shattered the walls of hell, returned to earth, and is now seated in heaven—death has no claim on you, either.
So we can’t earn righteousness, but we can receive Christ’s. We will age and decay, death will continue his battle against our bodies—but it’s not that big of a deal when you know that Jesus already won the war.
Of course, I don’t want to look old. I’m always reapplying sunscreen, knowing I’ll be grateful I did in twenty years. Already regretting the summers when I didn’t. Already wondering how long I have left before everyone else will be able to see the tension that lives between my eyebrows. Always not-so-secretly enjoying it when strangers assume I’m the same age as my 14 year old sister, because it lets me imagine that death has forgotten about me for the last nine years. I can pretend that I’ve lived through almost a decade of sin and it barely left a mark.
But our fading beauty reveals God’s eternal glory. In 2 Corinthians, Paul describes Christians’ bodies as jars of clay with the light of Christ shining inside. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day,” Paul says. And although he’s describing physically wasting away because of persecution, I think the inward renewal applies to bodies being worn down by age, too. As our bodies begins to crack and fall apart, it becomes more and more obvious that “this all-surpassing power” we have as Christians “is from God and not from us.”
We’re temporary and fragile. How could we ever expect to be truly beautiful within this broken world? Death and sin will wear away at me, I will gray and wither, and I’m excited because as my clay jar crumbles it will reveal a God who is far more beautiful than I am. And when this earthly body passes away, I’ll be free to spend eternity with him in the new body he’ll give me in Heaven.
Christians ought to admire our gray hair and wrinkles. The book of Proverbs describes gray hair as a “crown of splendor,” the reward for living a long and godly life. (16:31) If God is at the center of your life, there’s no reason to be ashamed that he has sustained you for a long time—it’s actually something to celebrate. And if Jesus conquered death, getting older just means you’re reaching the end of what death can do to you.
I recently got an advertisement for Botox, in which a woman says she looked “more like herself” after getting fillers—as if the 25 year old version of a woman is her truest self. But I think we’ll only truly be ourselves, truly inhabit the bodies we were meant to have, after death loses its hold on the bodies we have now.
Paul compares our earthly bodies to tents that will eventually be destroyed, and when that happens we will move into “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.” “We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body at home with the Lord,” Paul continues. Despite all the little repairs we make on our earthly tents—all the futile things we do to fight against the wind and the sun, trying to convince each other that our tents are brand new—we have something so much better coming.
I’m only going to include the interesting footnotes on this piece, so if you want sources for something let me know and I’ll share the original copy with you
Gen Zers are also “maxing out their retirement savings” like no generation before. Why are we so anxious about our distant futures?
Obviously, men and women face different social experiences surrounding aging—and it seems like men are far less concerned. I recently read a quote saying that the internet expects women to be 25 from the time they’re 13 until they’re 30. My hunch is that this is because, deep down, our culture still values women most when they’re in their reproductive prime. As Jessica DeFino writes in a August 2023 article titled, 'There's no ethical way to sell products that target signs of aging,' even when we celebrate older women like Martha Stewart (81 years old) or middle-aged women like Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez (in their fifties) as beauty icons, it’s because they don’t look their age. We still don’t admire women who look older, we’re just idolizing women’s proximity to childbearing years—which means we still value women’s bodies as baby-making machines.
Although I highly doubt that fourteenth century Flemish women had airbrushed armpits, so maybe we’re still the most hair-phobic culture in history?
This was fire