I often think of a time before I knew what nasolabial folds were. I don’t remember how I learnt the term, but every day since, I’ve noticed them in the mirror. Horrible parentheses over my lips. Sometimes they’re deeper, and in the fluorescent lighting of the university bathroom, where I usually touch my face up before teaching, I imagine they’re Death’s Valley, or the Mariana trench. A wrinkle on a pear before it worsens into rot. Sometimes before teaching, students will share a cigarette with me outside, assuming I’m one of them, and looking younger than “my age” gives me a perverse joy.

I went to watch The Substance a month before I turned 30. And I noticed my nasolabial folds, as I do every time I look in the mirror, when I tidied my face up in the cinema bathroom. The noticing is static at this point: it exists alongside other maladies. Like a Cubist, I plot each feature in isolation, from various angles, again and again and again. 

The plot of The Substance is relatively simple: a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance, temporarily creates a younger, better version of the user. A desperate actress, well into middle-age and ignored by an industry she once succeeded in, tries the experimental medication. As one can imagine, things go wrong, and only get worse from there.   

Ageing has always gnawed at women. In the poem Mirror by Sylvia Plath, the speaker imagines a withered crone, and reflects: “Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness / In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

But in this poem, Plath is talking about a mirror. Times have changed. The average Briton takes 450 selfies a year. These perceptions have not only worsened, but accelerated. 

While The Substance is not revolutionary in suggesting that ageing is traumatic, especially for women, it is bold to examine ageing in the wake of new technologies and the burgeoning social norms that follow.

It correctly assesses, albeit heavy-handedly, that the culture is navigating these changes malignantly. The discourse is metastatic in its contradictions and augmenting ideologies.

A litany of anxieties greet me when I refresh my twitter feed. I read about “The Wall”: a red-pill philosophy tells me women’s looks peak at 25 and they must settle for ‘betas’ after such. Despite that, I still enjoyed a “Brat summer”, which told me it’s normal to be a 32 year old teenage girl. Ex-tumblr Coquettes wax and wane on the bambi-not-bimbo delicacy of “girlhood” as they turn 27. People argue intensely over what seems to me the most minutiae of age gaps, concluding that a 25 year old has dangerous power over a 22 year old. 

There is a famous meme format that shows two panels: “my parents at X age vs me at X age”. It shows parents buying a house, raising children, falling in love. The “me”, meanwhile, sits sniffing dust he or she mistakes for ketamine off a rug, or refreshing the instagram feed of an OnlyFans model for the 200th time that day. Many undergraduates I teach write short stories with characters who are 30 with families. Not only families, but multiple children, and robust communities. I wonder what they think about me, at the cusp of the decade, and none of these cultural markers to show for it.  

This awkward messaging around ageing — or rather, our refusal to age — or rather, regardless, that we are doing ageing wrong — sits uncomfortably with biological fact and economic realities. Women’s fertility begins to decline after the age of 35, and many of the economic markers needed to sustain a family (an owned home, a certain level of income) are deliriously out of reach. 

There are some paltry and unconvincing answers: Silicon Valley millionaire Bryan Johnson has started a “Don’t Die” campaign, which does what it says on the tin. Celebrities have taken advantage of fertility technologies that have allowed them to use other women’s bodies to host their pregnancies: essentially, no matter the age, renting a womb. Affordable housing has become a single-voter political issue for many. It’s become increasingly mainstream for parties across the spectrum to pay lip-service to pro-natalist economic policies, though what that means in practice varies widely.

It can often feel for women, we either die a teen, or live long enough to see ourselves become a MILF — and motherhood increasingly seems like an unattainable future. 

In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques expounds on the “seven ages of man”, following a well-marked gradient from infant to elderly. These variations are foreign to us now: lover, soldier, judge. Ru Paul quips “you’re born naked, and the rest is drag, baby”, but more realistically, we are born naked, and the rest is a drag. A drag that fails to differentiate itself in eras, and continues until the limitations of the body set in.

Age is just a number, but in the way a 5 or 10 on a banknote is merely a number

With these blurred lines, it’s tempting to say “age is just a number”. In some ways, yes. Age is just a number, but in the way a 5 or 10 on a banknote is merely a number. It’s an uncomfortable and implicit currency, and as our notes grow illegible, the usual tender feels barely legal. Do I feel younger than my age? Sure. The more interesting question is: how does this feeling matter in a materialistic sense?

Should I embrace ageing? Embrace what? My lifestyle is the same as when I was a student. I go on a date with a guy who is 7 years younger than me who insists he is older. I never notice he is younger. I thought about that when I watched the film. Demi Moore, the lead, infamously dated Ashton Kutcher when she was 45: he was a full 15 years younger. She said she “couldn’t feel” the age gap, and rather, their difference felt like a “do-over”. Despite this, she’s spoken consistently about her immense fear of growing older, and the pain she felt when Kutcher sought out younger woman.

In one memorable scene, Margaret Qualley — the “younger, better” version — wears a face splattered with blood. The male companion I saw the film with noted parallels with Carrie. I thought of vampire facials, a microneedling procedure in which one’s own palettes are injected straight into one’s face to improve the appearance of fine lines. This, like nasolabial folds, is knowledge I wish I did not have. 

The film succeeds most in making transparent — not only transparent, but explicit — the contemporary incongruence between mental and physical bodies. We are not only mind versus body: we are living in a hyperdualistic age, compounded by economic, cultural, and technological factors. The fact our mind has any influence over our bodies, could even will our bodies towards action, can be shocking. We cling to online avatars. We are often nothing like them: we sit behind them, trying to forget that we have fingernails and cellulite. 

The film has an almost impressive amount of ass shots: I noted at first that it was reminiscent of a music video. Then, of advertisement. Then, of pornography. Then, of an Instagram feed. And finally, of contemporary cinematic artistry. These segmentations have all become synonymous. And yet, for the amount of body shown, this world is almost surely mental. Looking at bodies is different than living in a body. To switch the genders, think of the man addicted to pornography, at the perpetual expense of his boner growing softer in day to day life.

Even foremost feminist philosophers were not immune to worries around ageing. Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her memoir something that echoes that aforementioned Plath: “When I look, I see my face as it was, attacked by the pox of time for which there is no cure”.

She later would reconcile in her essay “Old Age” that she optimistically envisioned ageing “would be a period of life different from youth and maturity, but possessing its own balance and leaving a wide range of possibilities open to the individual.” But the conditions to have the agency to reach this are barren.

Instead of integration, there is an oil and water approach. Think of the uncanniness of overdone fillers. These puffy, girlish faces exist beyond old and young: the hopeful Love Islander on the same plane as the desperate Kardashian. Women who look simultaneously tampered with and improved. The in-your-face use of syringes as symbolism in The Substance indelicately but articulately suggests the casual proliferation of injectables. 

Googling the film at home, I felt both reassured and pathetic in noticing that Margaret Qualley, who was chosen to represent the sexy young new thing, is 29 years old, turning 30 only 4 days before I do. She’s avoided nasolabial folds. Hers eclipse her rosebud lips as the most subtle and romantic punctuation. She is stunning and will enter the daunting decade first. What can I do with this feeling? 

As it is now, there is no solution, only serum.