This article appeared in The Times [Sourced here] For those seeking the elixir of youth, an occasional wrinkle-smoothing injection can be an effective option. But, if any female friends were to ask, you should say you did it to get ahead in your career.
This is because women judged those who had anti-ageing procedures more harshly if it was to help them find a partner rather than to feel better about themselves or for work reasons, a study has suggested.
Researchers studied the reactions of 306 men and women to different scenarios in which middle-aged women had used cosmetic treatments, such as Botox injections and dermal fillers. While men judged women the same regardless of the reasons behind their anti-ageing endeavours, women took their specific motivations into account.
The participants were told for example: “Beth is a middle-aged woman who wants to maintain a more youthful appearance to look for a romantic partner. She regularly uses professional treatments such as Botox and dermal fillers as part of her anti-ageing treatment.”
The researchers found that overall, men were harsher critics of women’s attempts to stave off the ageing process.
“As women are the main consumers of cosmetic products and procedures, it could be that female raters viewed engaging in age concealment behaviour as more typical and therefore had more positive assessments,” said the team, from Swansea University.
“Women evaluated the women most positively when age concealment was motivated by self-esteem, followed by employment, and least positively for romantic purposes,” the team wrote in their research paper.
“This finding highlights the idea that personal well-being as motivation for appearance enhancement is more accepted than other motivations.”
The lead author of the study, Michael Jeanne Childs, said: “From an evolutionary perspective, our findings suggest that women are judged more negatively by other women when they use cosmetic treatments to attract a partner because they may be viewed as a competitor for the same resource, that is, a romantic partner.
“This is supported by our findings that the women who have higher intrasexual competitiveness traits would also judge our targets more negatively compared to women with lower competitiveness.”
To measure intrasexual competitiveness — competitiveness towards their own sex — the team gave the participants personality tests in which they had to rate how much they agreed with statements such as “I wouldn’t hire a very attractive man/woman as a colleague”, and “I cannot stand it when I meet another man/woman who is more attractive than I am”.
They found that the women with high competitiveness were more judgmental in general than the other women across all scenarios.
The findings are published in the peer-reviewed journal Evolutionary Behavioural Sciences.
