Twentysomethings feeling pressure to retain looks

CHICAGO. Forget "40 is the new 30." Now even twentysomethings are joining the quest for eternal youth by using anti-aging products and wrinkle treatments.

Some young adults say they want to reverse the effects that the sun has already had on their skin. Others already are feeling social pressure to retain fresh-faced looks.

"Instead of starting when you're 40 or 45, you might as well start now," said Joanne Katsigiannis, a 24-year-old from suburban Chicago who has been using anti-aging products for about two years.

Like a lot of people her age, Katsigiannis once spent hours at tanning booths and out in the sun. She thought that she looked better tan, until she realized that her skin was starting to scar.

For Leslie Speyers, it's as much about keeping up appearances as anything. "Vanity is probably the main reason I started using anti-aging products, as superficial as it is," said Speyers, 24, who works for a publishing company in Grand Rapids, Mich. She notes that maintaining a youthful look is a common worry among her friends - including one who has begun to dye her dark-brown hair to hide some gray, and another who uses skin-firming lotion on her legs because she thinks that they look too flabby.

Both genders agree that women bear the brunt of this kind of anti-aging pressure - though not exclusively.

"For guys my age, investing in your face is less of a priority than investing in a house or car," said Josh Levitt, 23, of Laguna Beach, Calif. Still, even he has started using anti-aging products at the urging of his mother, who wants him to preserve his "golden boy" looks, as she puts it.

Baby-boomer women are grabbing the spotlight in ways that women their age may not have in the past. Models Christie Brinkley and Cheryl Tiegs, for instance, have been on a recent campaign to take a popular catch-phrase a step further by touting that "50 is the new 30." And people are buying it.

"Now younger women are looking at these boomer women and saying, 'Wow, it's not so bad growing older,'" said Denise Fedewa, a senior vice president at the Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett. "Maybe they're as much the trendsetters as younger women."