The Beauty Standard Just Stopped Being Human

I have a love-hate relationship with AI, and I don't think it’s going to change any time soon.

The hate part is easy to explain. Scroll for two minutes and you'll find women who don't have a single pore or wrinkle - perfect skin, perfect symmetry, perfect everything. We spent years trying to deal with unrealistic photo filters that made everyone look better than they did, and now we're being asked to measure ourselves against women who are literally made up. Lordy.

But it’s not all hate for me…

Twenty years of looking for women who don't exist in stock photos

I've been running a skincare business for over 20 years, and for literally all of that time I could not find photos of my own customers.

If you've never gone looking for stock images of women between 35 and 65, let me save you the trouble - they barely existed. Stock sites gave me two choices: a 24-year-old with flawless skin, or an older woman who looked like she'd been cast in every medication commercial ever made. That enormous middle space was almost entirely missing (with the exception of that one blond model in her 50's on iStock which was so overly used that you’d be sure to recognize her).

Did I use the flawless 20-somethings anyway? Yes, more times than I want to admit, and it always bothered me. It never felt authentic to my brand and I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent over the years searching for stock images of real middle aged women.

AI changed that. For the first time I can now create images of women of different ages, races, shapes and moods - women who look confident, women who look soft, women who look a little tired but still beautiful, which is arguably my entire personal brand. Being able to show the women I'm actually talking to is not a small thing. Representation matters, and for two decades I couldn't buy it at any price.

So no, I don't think AI is all bad. I definitely don’t like a lot about it, but it has its perks. I guess like most things, it depends on how it’s used.

Here's where it gets dangerous

When I first started making AI images of women my age, I couldn't get anything that looked acceptable to me. The AI understood 25. It understood 75. But 48? Apparently unthinkable. I'd ask for a middle-aged woman and get a 28-year-old in a blazer (as if asking for someone older automatically implied that their fashion sense went to shit). I'd ask for some wrinkles and get one tiny wrinkle beside the eye, or I’d get someone old enough to be my great-grandmother.

It took months of practice and research before I could get images that looked like actual women instead of youthful women with one symbolic wrinkle.

And that's the problem. Most people using AI for marketing are never going to do that work. They'll type a prompt, take whatever the machine hands them, and post it - and what the machine hands you, by default, is perfection, because that's what it was trained on. Which means the comparison problem we already had is about to get a whole lot worse.

At least a filter starts with a real face

When we compared ourselves to a filtered photo, there was still a human being underneath it. Good lighting, a flattering angle, some editing, maybe a great dermatologist - but a real woman with real skin having a real day.

An AI image has none of that. There's no woman. No pores, no morning mirror moment, no menopause, no stress, no grief, no laugh lines earned from years of actually laughing. There is nothing underneath it at all.

So when an image makes you feel bad about your face, it's worth asking a very simple question: is this even real? And if it isn't, why am I letting it have a vote?

Real is still the goal

So let’s not stop forgetting…

Forgetting that real skin has texture. Forgetting that aging actually has a look. Forgetting that women don't go straight from glowing 30-something to sweet elderly lady in a beige cardigan - there's a whole enormous, gorgeous, complicated middle, and most of us are living in it right now.

We deserve to see ourselves there. Not erased, not airbrushed backwards into our thirties, not aged up into a stereotype. Just shown honestly.

Your face doesn't have to compete with a generated one. Your lines don't mean you failed at something, and your texture was never a problem to be solved. You're a human woman who has lived a human life, and that will always be more beautiful than a face a computer.

Flawed doesn't mean less. Flawed means alive. Let’s not forget that. 

If any of this landed, this is the final piece of our Aging Authentically campaign - 24 weeks of honest letters, hard conversations, and permission to be exactly as real as you already are. You can follow it on social media, or read the whole thing from the beginning here.