Longevity Culture Rebrands $78 Billion Anti-Ageing Market as Science-Backed Self-Care
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Jul 14
Longevity Culture Rebrands $78 Billion Anti-Ageing Market as Science-Backed Self-Care
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Jul 14
Summary
$78 billion anti-ageing products are increasingly sold under labels like “longevity,” “pro-ageing” and “preventative ageing,” recasting old youth-obsessed marketing in scientific language rather than abandoning it.
Researchers and critics say that shift still frames ageing as failure: the older “successful ageing” ideal split later life into good and bad outcomes, while newer biotech and skincare claims promise to slow, reverse or optimize normal ageing.
Hundreds of biotech firms, influencers and off-label drug users have helped mainstream the movement, even as evidence remains thin for some popular interventions such as metformin or rapamycin for human longevity.
Ageism now reaches younger cohorts too, with social media, beauty marketing and anxiety about control pushing anti-wrinkle products and “age prevention” messages onto people far from old age.
Anthropologists and psychologists argue the deeper issue is status and discrimination: as long as looking younger brings social and economic rewards, longevity culture will keep repackaging anti-ageing rather than challenging ageism itself.