Anti-Aging Cream: The Half-Face Experiment

by The Beheld

Do anti-aging face creams work? Between the moisturizing that any old cream will give you, and plain old wishful thinking, it’s impossible to tell. Unless! Unless, in the name of Science, you are willing to apply anti-aging cream to one-half of your face for a month. Methodology as follows:

PROBLEM: Father Time, and his presence on our faces.

INFORMATION: Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair promises to “smooth fine lines & texture” and “fade the look of stubborn deep wrinkles.” At age 34.8, the subject is developing both of these, though the wrinkles prefer to be thought of as “tenacious,” not stubborn. Tauruses! (Ed. note: No one is paying Autumn to say any of this.)

HYPOTHESIS: Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair will alter subject’s face jack squat. Hypothesis data drawn from gene-based skepticism, and a longitudinal study of tangentially related products, including, but not limited to, mattifying creams, renewal serums, night creams, and pore minimizers, the effects of which are negligible. Except for the renewal serum, which makes you feel like Marie Antoinette, but in the right way.

EXPERIMENT: For 30 days, subject applied Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair to the right side of her face exclusively. As a control, the left side of her face received its usual skin care routine of bat blood, recitations from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Kiehl’s.

DATA:

CONCLUSION: Neutrogena Rapid Wrinkle Repair altered subject’s face slightly more than jack squat. The cream’s effects are most clearly seen when looking in the mirror and grinning maniacally so as to increase the incidence of fine lines. When looking at herself four inches away from the mirror, subject reported a clear improvement in age-related effects; the benefits of looking several hours younger, however, are offset by the grotesquerie of the maniacal grinning. Fifty-nine percent of impartial respondents reported an improvement in subject’s fine lines and wrinkles, a percentage that dropped slightly when respondents made their guesses in-person as opposed to scrutinizing a photograph. We believe this is due to the exquisite awkwardness live subjects feel when asked to evaluate someone’s face, so the lesson here is that really, nobody cares but you. Ex Scientia, Veritas.

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano examines our cultural concepts of beauty at The Beheld. She humbly hopes that Mr. Brown, her seventh-grade science teacher, will retroactively change her final grade as a result of this experiment.