Gen Z Is In For A Rude Awakening If They Think Lana Del Rey Looks Old — ‘You’re Not Beautiful, You’re Just Young’
You do realize you're going to get old one day too, right kids?
@honeymoon Lana Del Rey | Instagram Singer Lana Del Rey was one of the highlights at the Los Angeles country festival Stagecoach, with her performance earning raves. But not everyone who watched the show is giving it high marks, all because Del Rey seems to have had the audacity to actually look something approaching her age.
Some Gen Z social media users think Lana Del Rey looked 'old' in her Stagecoach performance.
Lana Del Rey seems to have become an instant favorite from the yearly Stagecoach festival, where she appeared in part to promote her delve into country music with her forthcoming album "The Right Person Will Stay," building on the American sensibility she's always brought to her career as a "pop girlie."
Del Rey's set seems to have wowed both online spectators and critics, especially when it comes to the three new songs she debuted, “Quiet in the Storm,” “Husband of Mine,” and “57.5," the latter of which reveals her past dalliance with country star Morgan Wallen — and playfully disses him in the lyrics.
But for many Gen Z spectators, the music seemed to be beside the point. Del Rey's looks caught far more attention, specifically the way she — gasp! — seems to have aged. At 39 years old, a few facial lines are to be expected when you dare not to botox them out of your forehead, as Del Rey seems to have chosen to do. Nevertheless, an absurd conversation about aging seems to have been sparked.
Clips of Del Rey's performance drew comments from Gen Z'ers about the lines on her forehead.
It feels weird to even say this because it's so stupid and it doesn't matter, but even with a few facial lines, Lana Del Rey doesn't even look anywhere near her 39 years. Even if she did, this conversation would still be silly, but it seems all the more absurd given how youthful she still looks.
But then, this is a generation that has become somewhat infamous for looking much, much older than they are because of their love for botox and other alterations like lip injections, often starting while they're still in their teens.
Of course, this is probably a tiny minority of the generation that just gets the most attention online, but nevertheless, the trend is so readily identifiable that even venerated fashion magazines like Women's Wear Daily have reported on the curious trend in which Gen Z seems to be aging far faster than millennials due to "skin care faux pas and injectables gone wrong."
Gen Z doesn't seem to have an understanding of what natural aging looks like.
The point is, this does not seem to be a generation that has a realistic view of what "aging" or "youthful" even mean, let alone what is a "normal" appearance for a certain age. When you've barely seen your own image in years without TikTok's beauty filter applied to it, it tends to skew both your perceptions and your fears about aging. (As a Xennial who makes TikToks for a living and gasps every time he looks in an unfiltered mirror, I speak from experience.)
Gen Z has also become infamous, especially since the election, for taking on retrograde social and political opinions straight out of the '80s and '90s, so a sneering, pearl-clutching response to a 39-year-old having the temerity to have a few laugh lines is really no surprise.
The media gleefully called Madonna "Grandma" back in 1993 when she was just 34 to great fanfare, after all, a perfect example of the distasteful "what's old is new again" zeitgeist that Gen Z has ushered in — or at least been indoctrinated into.
You need look no further than "clean girl aesthetic" and "tradwife" and "milkmaid dress" and all the other beauty trends Gen Z women have glommed onto to see the kind of retrograde standards about what women "should" be doing with their looks and bodies gleefully adopted by many among the Gen Z age cohort.
But the response to Del Rey and those like her indicates more than just a worrisome re-embracing of ridiculous and unrealistic beauty standards. It indicates a generation that is in for an incredibly rude awakening, and probably sooner rather than later.
Getting old is a privilege, and it's going to happen to Gen Z, too. But will they be able to handle it?
TikTok creator Luke (@Lukehnsn) perfectly summed up this ridiculous uproar in a TikTok he posted after seeing Gen Z'ers criticizing Del Rey's supposedly "old" appearance (which I cannot stress enough is completely a figment of their imagination).
"Lana Del Rey is beautiful and only 39 years old," he said in his video. "A couple of lines on your face are gonna happen." But he also offered some deceptively simple but sage advice for Gen Z: "Just remember that in your 20s, you're not beautiful. You're just young."
His video drew thousands of comments, all of them variations on the same theme, including a few sobering cautionary tales. "The karma for ageism is brutal," one person wrote. "Y’all’ve been warned."
"I worry that Gen Z will crash out after their 20s because they can’t cope with aging," another added, while one commenter was far more blunt. "Everyone acts like [aging] won’t happen to them when the only way to escape aging is death."
To live to 39 or 49 or 89 or, heck, 29, is a privilege, and even more so when you've had to survive something like addiction, as Lana Del Rey has. Aging comes for all of us, and it will for Gen Z, too.
But as someone "old" who spent the entire of his 20s and 30s panicking about aging and being "too ugly" to then lose everything and nearly die at 35, I can say from experience to any disgruntled Gen Z'ers reading this: Aging comes with even more vengeance when you make it your entire personality, and every minute spent worrying and projecting that fear onto others is wasted.
Turn the beauty filters off, put the phone down, go look at your unaltered face in the mirror, and get comfortable with it, because it will never look this young again. And soon enough, you will feel like a fool for having ever had such an absurdly distorted view of what "old" is — and there won't be an injection or makeup tip or phone filter in the world that will allow you to escape it.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
