The Best Kept Secret Blog - Wrinkles vs. The Anti-Aging Creams

Who would have guessed that my face would turn into a theatre of war and that my teenage years spent listening to Paul Simon on my transistor radio while suntanning in the back yard would be the friendly fire that proved my undoing?

I'm talking about my wrinkles, crows feet, laugh lines, frown lines, deep lines, fine lines (pick one) and the creams that promise to obliterate them and liberate me from aging.

It all started simply enough. Last Friday I ran out of moisturizer. No big deal. I had errands to do that afternoon. I'd just pop into the drugstore and buy some more.

I popped in. I made my way to the moisturizer aisle. And there is a whole aisle, by the way. An entire aisle devoted to greasing our skin. In my mother's day, there was Vaseline and Nivea. But I digress....

So there I am, standing in the aisle, staring at the huge selection of skin care products, trying to figure out what's right for me when I become aware of a kind of code that all the various brands seem to employ. None of them called their products, "This Makes Your Skin Feel Less Tight Cream". No, they were way more serious than that. They meant business. They were all out to blow my wrinkles to kingdom come.

At the more benign end of the scale were the "therapists". Dermaglow, for example, offered me Advanced Wrinkle Therapy and Targeted Wrinkle Therapy for $120 and $80 respectively. I imagine these are designed to work with my wrinkles, make them understand they're there due to some unresolved childhood trauma and help them move on to become new and improved skin.

Loreal's Wrinkle De-Crease and Nivea Visage's Wrinkle Reducer made me think a few wrinkles were permitted, as long as they toed the line and knew their place. Less was definitely more.

NeoStrata saw wrinkles as a more serious enemy. Their Wrinkle Defense clearly was there to defend the fort, I mean the face, at all costs.

The real heavy weapons were wielded by Modele. They're openly anti-wrinkle. If the Anti-Wrinkle Face Treatment doesn't do the trick, they'll trot out the big guns and try to annihilate the suckers with their Intensive Anti-Wrinkle Spot Facial.

I briefly thought I should give these weapons in the war on aging more respect. Apparently some radicals, free radicals to be accurate, have been loosed in my body and they're making me look old. The lotions and potions are simply trying to seek out and destroy this enemy.

Now if I had the choice, would I rather my skin looked the way it did in my 20s than the way it does now? Yeah, probably. But shelling out the big bucks for this stuff won't turn back time.

I like to think that the lines got there because I used my face. Because I laughed and cried and worried and had an interesting life. Maybe we should be more worried if we don't have the wrinkles. Perhaps it indicates a life that's been lived less well?

Though up against a powerful force, I would not surrender. After some time, I managed to find a Neutrogena daily moisturizer with a 30 SPF. It just promises to make my skin feel less tight and protect me from the sun.

My wrinkles? They live to fight another day.