Beauty product ads guarantee white teeth and wrinkle free skin. Here’s why lies work

I’ve been told many lies over the years. This, I realize, is not shocking news, because to live is to lie. We lie or get lied to all of the time.

Children are lied to by their parents about many things, ranging from the fantastical adventures of a certain jolly man in red to being told by your mother if you moisturize your neck every night from the age of 12, you’ll never look like your Aunt Dottie (who went by the name “Wattle”).

I religiously followed this advice, yet my neck now has more wrinkles than a linen shirt that’s been wadded up and used as a gymnastic mat. So, bottom line: My mom lied.

As kids you’re taught not to lie but you soon learn that if you rebrand your lies into different categories, from white lie to a slight exaggeration, then you can tell yourself it’s not really a lie. It’s more like a half-truth, so technically not a lie, which enables you to look your parents in the eye and say, “No, I’m not lying.”

This skill is honed when you’re a teenager and really reaches mastery in our adult years. Part of our lifelong lying curriculum is, of course, advertising. For example, the fact that toothpaste companies are allowed to say that a whitening toothpaste can “remove 15 years of stains” is a whopping lie.

Oh, I’m sure it all depends on how one defines “stains,” but common sense tells me that this toothpaste is not taking my teeth on a time traveling journey back to when I was in my 40s. The “lie” irks me so much that I went off about it in the toothpaste aisle at Target to two total strangers. The man fled but the woman joined in my rant and I felt a profound moment of sisterhood.

I think this is because women start getting lied to at an early age. Just look at the beauty industry. It’s a lie factory constantly manufacturing falsehoods to make us spend money to “fix” ourselves.

There’s been a lot of social media coverage about girls in elementary school flocking to Sephora (a beauty product store) to buy skin care products because even at 10 they’ve been led to believe that you need a retinol wrinkle cream. Can I judge them? No, because I was slathering my neck with a gooey mix of Vaseline, Noxema and Pond’s Cold Cream when I was 12.

Spoiler alert to all you 10-year-olds: You can’t fight the march of time. One day you’ll look old because gravity is a cruel mistress and wrinkles seem to have military grade GPS. So you can run, sister, but you can’t hide.

What makes lying so easy and omnipresent is that humans are an easy mark. We want to believe what people tell us. For example, parents desperately want to believe their kids aren’t lying to them. Just like I wanted to believe that petroleum jelly would render me ageless.

To go through life thinking no one is truthful is a horrible way to live. And it’s becoming harder and harder to not think that way. That’s thanks, in part, to the last two presidential election cycles, which have probably jettisoned a not insignificant number of people into the “everyone is lying” stratosphere.

The only suggestion I have to combat this trust issue is to follow the advice of my father, who used to say he believed in facts, not people. I always thought it was a pessimistic approach to life, but in 2024 he’s probably spot on.

Reach Sherry Kuehl at snarkyinthesuburbs@gmail.com, on Facebook at Snarky in the Suburbs, on Twitter at @snarkynsuburbs on Instagram @snarky.in.the.suburbs, and snarkyinthesuburbs.com.