Dr Kathryn Fox is an Australian medical doctor and bestselling crime writer, best known for her forensic thrillers featuring pathologist Dr Anya Crichton. Drawing on her medical expertise, she crafts gripping, authentic crime fiction and is also a passionate advocate for forensic medicine education and public engagement. Her columns appear twice weekly.
I may not practise in a surgery anymore, but many of my conversations still involve people’s medical problems.
And more frequently, some of those conversations are disturbingly consistent.
If 60 is the new 40, when does ageing itself begin to be perceived as a problem?
I’m hearing about 10 and twelve-year-old girls wanting peptide injections and expensive skincare routines based on the latest TikTok influencer recommendations. Skin care lines targeting under 13s.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether the products are legal, regulated, or even approved for use in Australia.
“You can get them on the internet anyway.”
To an adult, that may sound reckless. To a not-yet-fully-developed pre-adolescent brain, it can sound like reassurance.
Besides, “everyone is doing it.”
Mothers of teens often say their daughters want to start regular botox injections to get ahead of any facial wrinkles forming.
If prepubescent children and teenagers are already terrified of ageing, what does that say about the society they’re growing up in?
What are they seeing – and learning – about how older people are viewed, valued and treated?
Children don’t fear wrinkles naturally.They learn what society rewards, what it mocks, and what it ignores.
The anti-ageing movement presents itself as being about health: better nutrition, exercise, quality sleep, preventative medicine, maintaining strength and independence into later life.
On the surface, that sounds entirely reasonable. And much of it is.
Exercise matters enormously as we age. Maintaining muscle mass, mobility and cardiovascular health can profoundly affect quality of life and independence later on.
But lately, I wonder whether some of what we’re seeing is less about health – and more about fear of ageing itself.
Somewhere along the way, healthy ageing and refusing to age became blurred together.
When kids are obsessing about staying young, is it a fear or a phobia?
Cosmetic procedures have followed a similar trajectory.
Treatments once largely associated with celebrities and the very wealthy are now commonplace. Injectables, fillers and cosmetic “tweakments” have become so normalised that genuinely natural ageing is becoming less visible.
Sometimes I look at before-and-after photos of actors, celebrities and public figures and suddenly feel old.
Not because they necessarily look younger than me, but because so many now look alike. The individuality that once made faces distinctive can start to disappear beneath the same aesthetic ideals – the same lips, cheeks, jawlines and expressions.
I sometimes wonder whether the procedures themselves naturally create that sameness, or whether everyone is simply going to the same doctors.
Either way, there’s something unsettling about it. Consider the recent backlash Rachel Ward faced online for ageing naturally and being photographed. I wonder whether that response came from malice, or from the fact that we rarely see public figures age naturally anymore. And when natural ageing becomes less visible, it can start to feel abnormal – even to people ageing normally themselves.
This places enormous pressure on people as they age. Faces become tighter, smoother, subtly altered and more uniform. Our visual baseline for what ageing looks like has quietly shifted.
We increasingly tell people to “age naturally” while simultaneously rewarding those who appear not to age at all.
That contradiction is impossible to ignore.
I worry that we’re creating new disorders, just as painfully thin models created an unachievable ideal and body dysmorphia and eating disorders rose in young women.
Boys and men are now entering these spaces in growing numbers too.
What was once largely marketed towards women has expanded into a broader culture of optimisation – peptides, testosterone, biohacking, Ozempic, supplements, longevity clinics and aggressive fitness regimens aimed not simply at health, but at resisting ageing itself.
Some of these interventions are evidence-based. Some are sensible. Some are undoubtedly helping people. But not everything marketed as optimisation is necessarily benign.
We can already see what excessive or poorly executed cosmetic procedures can do externally. Faces can gradually change beyond recognition, often in the pursuit of looking younger.
It makes me wonder what may be happening internally in people pursuing ever more aggressive forms of biohacking, particularly when some treatments remain poorly regulated or insufficiently studied long term.
Ageism exists.
Women of a certain age often describe feeling invisible, unheard and overlooked – in workplaces, media, relationships and public life. More men are now beginning to experience versions of the same thing.
It’s difficult to tell people to embrace ageing in a culture that often punishes them for visibly doing it. Perhaps that’s the real force driving much of the anti-ageing movement.
Not vanity alone. But fear of becoming irrelevant – professionally and socially.
If this continues, will 25 eventually become the new 15? The thought is frightening.
Because perhaps the most revealing thing about the anti-ageing movement is not how far medicine has advanced.
It’s how uncomfortable society has become with visible ageing itself.