Aging Gracefully - One Wrinkle at a Time

Don't buy into the anti-aging hype

- Ms. Simone Preuss

I was recently strolling through a busy shopping street, looking for a post office, when a young sales person in front of one of the shops stopped me. “Would you like a free hand cream?” she asked, waving a small sample sachet in front of my nose. “Sure,” I said, thinking that I had missed to put lotion on my hands in the morning.

Seeing my eager agreement, the saleslady beckoned me inside the store, gesturing towards a chair in front of a small desk. “Have a seat. I'll show you one of our products,” she said. I planted myself in the chair, keeping one bag on the floor and one on another chair.

Expertly, the lady opened the cap of a tube full of cream. Expecting the cream on my hands, I was surprised when she explained that this was for the face. Undereye cream to be precise, for those wrinkles. “Do you use anything under your eyes?” she asked. “Yes, I do,” I answered truthfully.

“This cream will lift your skin, smoothening out those undereye wrinkles,” she explained. “Would you like to try it?”

Before I could say yes or no, she had already put three little dabs under my right eye and then started applying the cream evenly. “Are you allergic to anything?”, she inquired, more like an afterthought. “Luckily I am not,” I said. “You should have started with that question.”

“It is antiallergic and all tested,” the lady said, confidently.

“Look up,” she instructed, then pointed something like a commercial hair dryer at my face to dry up the cream quicker. Soon, I could feel tightness under my eye as if the skin was being pulled.

“That is the skin being lifted,” the saleslady explained. She stopped the hairdryer and looked at her handy work admiringly.