Moore’s Law is an early computing principle that observed transistors were shrinking so fast that every two years the number of them that would fit on a single chip could double. There’s a similar accelerative shrinkage principle at work in women’s magazines. If once upon a time, their beauty pages provided general tips on weight loss and smooth skin, today they have gone granular. There’s back fat and “bat wings” and faulty chin position, all with their own particular diagnoses and cures. Your body may be a finite assemblage of biological matter, but its potential problem areas are infinite.
Say hello, then, to wrinkly cleavage, or as a beauty feature in the print edition of Vogue puts it this month, “aging décolletés.” The magazine reports that the fashion world’s focus on low-cut styles “has been sounding alarms” with the type of woman who saw Bella Hadid’s plunging red satin gown at Cannes and thought, “I would look great in that if it weren’t for these subtle lines on my bosom.”
Cleavage skin is thinner, more fragile, and less fat-padded than face and neck skin, you see. It scars more easily and heals more slowly, and it loses plumping collagen and elastin as the years tick onward. This makes it a dead giveaway for age, the magazine reports, “especially in the morning, when it can look as though someone has performed origami, folding the cleavage into an accordion configuration of creases that can take several hours to flatten out.” If Vogue thinks I am worried that my crepe-y morning cleavage will betray my age, I have to assume Vogue has not seen my face at 6 a.m. There’s a reason Rod Stewart didn’t sing about the morning sun hitting Maggie May’s décolletage.
I am behind the times, however, because chic woman apparently have been feeling bad about their clavicle areas for years now. The magazine reports that Cindy Crawford has been attuned to the problem since a French anti-aging expert warned her about it early in her career, and now she keeps a scarf in her car to protect her V-neck region from the sun while driving. She sleeps, we are told, with a special silicon triangle between her breasts on the night before a photo shoot. “When you’re 20, pillow lines go away in fifteen minutes,” she warns, “but as I’ve gotten older, I notice those lines take a little longer.”
If you don’t work in an industry where you must be able to display a line-free bust within 15 minutes of waking up, that’s no reason to relax. Would that we all had Cindy Crawford’s French anti-aging expert to warn us decades ago about the horrors of slumping upper-breast tissue. Luckily, there are now many products and procedures to help: lasers, injections, microneedling, NightLift shapewear, Estée Lauder’s New Dimension Tighten + Tone Neck/Chest Treatment, and the “medical grade SiO SkinPad,” to name a few.
After introducing readers to a new flaw they didn’t even know they had, Vogue takes the obligatory hairpin turn toward body-positivity at the end of the article. If you are somehow caught with an unexpectedly low neckline, the magazine magnanimously instructs, “you must embrace the danger and stand up all the straighter, shoulders thrown back … head held high.” And if you find yourself scrunching up your face for too long over the disingenuousness of prescribing confidence after peddling insecurity? There’s a laser for that.
