Try as you might, the human face cannot mask its age

A few days ago, actor Shefali Jariwala died of a cardiac arrest. There is speculation that her cardiac arrest was triggered by an injection of vitamin C and glutathione following a prolonged fast. There has since been a middle-class discussion about the dangers of these beauty rituals. People even dragged poor Botox into it. You may think these products would now be considered toxic. But I suspect the episode has opened new market segments for such products.

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People want to look young. If at all people want to be young, it is chiefly to look young. That’s odd because I knew many of them when they were young and they didn’t look that great even then. In any case, this is a central obsession of the world—to look young. But the pursuit is doomed. People stubbornly look their age. It’s 2025 and there is nothing science can do about it. There are clues to this all around.

When I was watching the latest Mission: Impossible movie, the moment Tom Cruise appeared on the screen, and it was a close shot if I am not mistaken, some people gasped. It was a sad gasp. He looked old, and they were surprised. He marked their youth, after all, and has been marking their time. Tom Cruise only looked his age: early 60s.

There is something very useful about the way he looks. If this multimillionaire, whose appeal lies to a large extent in his physical charisma, cannot mask the truth of his age, it conveys something very simple.

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Billionaires and other very rich people are proof that even money cannot buy the appearance of youth with the technology of today. Even Bryan  Johnson, the man who spends millions in the hope of reverse-ageing, somehow is not able to stop his face from betraying his age. The unkind world says he has spent millions to look older. But this column maintains that the 47-year-old pioneer looks about 46.

Like Tom Cruise, and millions of others with resolve or money, Johnson has a fit body that has the appearance of youth. But the human face is something of a clock. People only need to glance at it to tell its time. Maybe it is our eye, which is programmed to understand every square inch of a human face, its many expressions and meanings, what it has endured. 

In fact, older people don’t realize how old they appear to the young. (I am reminded of the tragic way my first day as a journalist unfolded. I was 20, and a senior journalist had taken me under her wing. At some point, she asked me to guess her age. She looked ‘old,’ so I said 65. Turned out, she was in her mid-40s. No one has shouted at me the way she did.)

Maybe the secret to looking young is actually not in sculpting one’s face, but in tampering with the eye of the beholder. I anticipate a day when people wear lenses that will make others look young.

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You may argue that people do look younger today than the previous generation, that today’s 60-year-olds look younger than our parents did. 

But what they look is not younger. They look like younger versions of 60-year-olds. It is like one of those old men with dyed-black hair. They look their age, but with black hair.

The reason why people are not able to stop ageing  might lie in physics rather than biology. The universe tends towards disorder. The phenomenon is known as ‘entropy.’ A smooth young face is a transient balance of perfectly working cells that will inevitably decay. The ways in which nature can attain order are very very few, but the ways in which it can achieve disorder are countless. And the odds of  skin staying taut are dismal. A wrinkle is not an intended design; it is one of billions of ways in which cells drift toward disorder. We age because it is very hard to violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Glutathione and vitamin C together can extend the order of cells, but not forever. Maybe because their effects are overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways in which things can collapse.

Glutathione et al might be new words in our vocabulary, but the fight of the human face has been going on for long. When I was 20 and moved to Mumbai from a provincial place, the posh women in my office used to speak conspiratorially of women who “did the procedure at lunch.” For a long time, I thought they were talking about abortion,  but they were talking about Botox.

Botox works by temporarily paralysing some muscles so that they don’t crease. It’s popular. A Botoxed face is, of course, clear,  but it still doesn’t mask one’s age.

People expect advances of science to rescue them from ageing. That expectation is one of the great delusions of our time. 

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Science is not exempt from the general mediocrity of the world. It is just better marketed. A crisis of science is that many of its important fields are not attracting enough talent because the few ‘cool’ streams take away the finest minds. There is one reason for hope, though—AI can run millions of trial-and-error simulations and reach breakthroughs that would take human researchers decades, or might elude them entirely.

But I believe the real breakthrough would be the lens that irons out the wrinkles of other people.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.