Advanced Anti-Aging Eye Treatment

Garden Botanika is a twenty-year old company with a mission of “creating products that are: botanically based, a careful blend of nature and science, cruelty-free, gentle to the environment and 100% guaranteed.” But age is just a number...we shouldn't make light of their efforts despite their relatively recent origin. I have made fun of the plastic-surgery disasters that litter Michigan Avenue, people with mis-sliced faces that result in taut masks of perpetual surprise, overly faux-tanned and then shellacked with cosmetics: base coat, prime coat, trim, veneer, powder, sand between layers. I appreciate some dialogue from the movie Lantana: “I like this age. I like my lines.” Current cultural trends celebrate the "Cougar"—the TV show, a "Golden Girls" art show—and I saw an advertisement for a hotel on the side of a bus, an attractive high-maintenance female of a certain age reaching from behind a pretty young male to adjust his tie in a way that I suspect was not maternal. 

The traditional feminist suggestion that we celebrate the "Crone" as wise is, typically, supplanted by the perpetual evaluation of women primarily as sex objects. But vanity appears to be the most basic human insecurity, so of course I'm going to use Garden Botanika's Advanced Anti-Aging Eye Treatment. Its pleasant pink color is caused by red wine polyphenols, and other ingredients include green tea extract, shea butter, and jojoba seed oil. It's unscented and does not contain chemical dyes. Perhaps I'd have a different perspective if I had subsidized botox access, but the use of assorted unguents and ointments in order to maintain a fresh and glowing hide strikes me as much more reasonable than any sort of invasive procedure. “Hope in a jar” may be justifiably derided, but if it makes the wearer feel better and produces discernible results, such substances at least meet the standard “first, do no harm.”

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