Vanity is a major concern for much of the American population. As a nation, we spend billions of dollars on products and services purely for the purpose of looking better or trying to prevent or hide aging. While some of these services, like orthodontics, offer other important benefits as well, things like breast augmentation, cosmetics and fashionable clothes are all about looking good.

Products that claim to reverse aging are a major offshoot of these products. Usually sold in health food stores and rarely examined by the Food and Drug Administration, many medical professionals say that many of these products don’t actually do what they claim to and may actually be harmful.

This obviously doesn’t matter to the people who buy the products, though. There are people who swear by diet and exercise, and there are people who swear by a salve to be rubbed in or a pill to be taken. Anything to avoid getting older. Anything that doesn’t involve work, that is. I can understand the mentality, too. I’m pretty bad about taking care of myself, and a magic pill that would keep me young forever sure does sound attractive.

Youth is extremely appealing in our society. It adds immeasurably to most people’s definition of what constitutes good looking, and it’s extremely important that a person look good in our society. We often judge people based off of a glance, sometimes rightly so. We make decisions based on the looks of other people in just about every facet of our lives, from jobs and dating to lending a person on the street a match.

The problem most people have with the anti-aging products is that people have a good chance of being duped into using something that may actually harm them. I don’t really see the problem, though. Granted, they aren’t being given exactly what they want, and no one deserves to be tricked into buying a product that doesn’t work.

What I believe, however, is that the people who buy these products aren’t getting nothing out of the deal. The ultimate motivation behind anti-aging products is wishing to be attractive to the person’s favored sex, and any beauty product that the consumer fully believes in is going to deliver something that is extraordinarily attractive and almost impossible to buy otherwise: confidence. Self-confidence is the reason why some people who would never even be glanced at can manage to date extraordinarily attractive people. It’s this self-confidence that can bring people the kind of happiness that comes from the inside they may otherwise have a lot of trouble finding.

Granted, that still brings up the health concerns that many of these products may present. I don’t think I would ever really be comfortable with using something that had been independently proven to not only be safe but work as claimed. How is it our place to say, “This is not what should make you happy, so I’m not going to let you do it”? It’s not my place, and I don’t think it should be anyone else’s either.