A fortnight ago, we left Egypt and its quest for an eternity in the afterlife. Our own age wants eternity here below: no longer preserving a body for the great journey, but holding on to youth for as long as possible. We barely even say anti-ageing any more. We say longevity, and the word has made its way into our very creams.
Skin longevity, the new watchword
The shift is not merely a matter of vocabulary. Anti-ageing corrected the signs, the wrinkle, the spot; longevity claims to tackle skin ageing itself, deep inside the cell. Biologists have described twelve hallmarks of ageing, popularised by Carlos López-Otín. Among them is cellular senescence: those “zombie” cells that stop renewing themselves and give off a dull, smouldering inflammation, slowly undermining the collagen and the radiance of the skin.
From the bottle to the freezer
A few names are emerging. The house of OneSkin, founded by scientists, presents itself not as a skincare brand but as a skin-longevity company, built around a peptide, OS-01: a study published in npj Aging (Zonari, 2023) showed, on human skin models, a halving of senescent cells and a revival of collagen. In luxury, Augustinus Bader, born of stem-cell research, has made regeneration its entire signature. Around them orbit spermidine and NAD, those longevity molecules everyone talks about, yet whose evidence comes mostly from yeast, worms, mice, or swallowed capsules, rarely from a cream.
And the quest does not stop at the bottle. It has become a billion-dollar industry. At Alcor, in Arizona, the blood of the deceased is replaced with a protective solution and the body is cooled to -196 degrees in liquid nitrogen, in the hope that the future will know how to revive it: cryonics, that embalming of the 21st century the Egyptians would not have disowned. Further still, laboratories such as Altos Labs, funded to the tune of three billion dollars by some of the greatest fortunes on the planet, are seeking to reprogramme our cells to reverse age; elsewhere, organs are already being printed in three dimensions. The pharaohs’ old dream has put on the clothes of Silicon Valley.
Eternity is not a bottle
So should we expect everything from a molecule, a freezer or a billionaire? No. The true longevity of the face rests first on gestures no technology can replace: restorative sleep, a living diet, sun protection kept up over time, skin that is not mistreated. The rest is regularity, that quiet discipline which, month after month, sustains the microcirculation, supports the production of collagen and elastin, and genuinely slows ageing. Egypt understood it before anyone else: eternity is not an object you possess, it is a treatment you repeat.
In the treatment room, I do not sell eternity in a bottle, still less in liquid nitrogen. I awaken the microcirculation through massage and drainage, I revive the exchanges, I help the skin do what it does best, regenerate. And because longevity is a matter of regularity, it is the repeated appointments that write the real difference. For him, Récupération. For her, La Parenthèse.