“To hell with it all!”: older women’s disengagement from age-masking beauty work

Abstract

Aging beyond youth presents challenges for women, who often struggle to remain visible and valued in an ageist society. To hide their age, many older women engage in age-masking beauty work, like coloring gray hair and using anti-aging products. While these practices have been the focus of prior research, limited attention has been given to women's disengagement from them. Moreover, ageist norms and ideologies largely situate disengagement as a failure to conform to youth-centric beauty norms - that is, as "letting oneself go" - rather than reflecting a deliberate decision to reject beauty norms and the objectifying view of women that they represent. To address this issue, we examine women's withdrawal from age-masking beauty work, drawing on in-depth interviews with women who range in age from 56 to 82 (n = 20). Mirroring previous studies, our analyses revealed that all the participants had felt pressure to retain a youthful appearance and had engaged in some form of age-related beauty work over their lives. Our study, however, expands the literature by focusing explicitly on disengagement, revealing three processes through which some women stepped away from age-masking beauty work: Conditional Disengagement, Supported Disengagement, and Practical-to-Critical Disengagement. By shifting the focus from women's participation in age-masking practices to their conscious withdrawal from them, our study reveals how disengagement can reflect an active rejection of youth-centric beauty standards, as well as the objectification of women: It reframes disengagement not as decline, but as resistance.

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