Courtesy of Jean Garnett.

The tears are the first tell, and what stops my scrolling: that’s not how tears work. The tears gather in wide, frightened eyes and spill over into droplets, but instead of sliding down the cheek and being absorbed into the skin or dripping off the face, these droplets dangle like snot from the eyes, transparent swells dragging down mucous threads. 

The eyes belong to a woman, a Pixaresque figure with a large head on a hunched body, who is crying in her cubicle. In subsequent versions she may be crying in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son’s soccer game or her daughter’s rehearsal dinner, but the cause of the tears is always the same: the woman is sad because she is aging, and she is aging because she is sad. She is a rumpled Möbius strip of cause and effect, agedness the total fact of her life. Naturally, the woman has failed, or is failing, to hang onto her husband: “You used to light up,” he says in one video. “You just don’t look like yourself anymore.” Or she overhears him telling a friend that she has “let herself go.” Or he has already left her for a much younger woman. Or he’s having an affair with a colleague who has not “let herself go.” 

Who will care about our heroine enough to stop her from allowing female age to happen to her? Who will step in? Sometimes it’s the woman’s sister, who just got back from a business trip to Seoul. Sometimes it’s her friend or colleague who works in Seoul. Sometimes the intervener is the woman’s daughter, who leaks goopy tears as she watches her father stride off into a new life with his much younger girlfriend. In this case, the daughter, forced to share in her mother’s humiliation, sets out to “save face”—her mother’s literally, her own figuratively—via the hydrating gel mask, or the serum, or the nonoxidizing foundation, or whatever it is. 

The new kind of skincare ad that is suddenly appearing every time I swipe through Instagram Reels is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as “Purification Slop,” clearly AI-generated marketing content appealing to and visualizing my fantasy that what ails me, including age, can be rendered isolable and extricable from me. The Intelligence knows that I thrill to depictions of anything “built up” inside me finally coming out. Am I aware that if, standing in a kitchen sunbeam, I take one sip of this mushroom beverage, cute little probiotics will go tra-la-la chimney sweeping through my intestines like Dick Van Dyke, making me positively glow with inner cleanness? Have I used this jade roller to drain my lymphatic fluid lately, or am I cool with hosting putrid waste in my corpus? The intelligence may also know that I’m single, that mirrors have become complicated for me—that it depends on the light, it depends on my mood.

These ads are infomercials, fake-science-wise, limited-time-offer-wise. But they feel more like mini soap operas (I just timed one at over ten minutes); they are extremely emo. Each Aging Woman Emomercial (AWE) tells a songified story, most often reminiscent of Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, building from confiding, conversational grief to a pleadingly triumphal chorus. It begins with a tearfully juicy hook: “This is the story of the day he walked away.” Or “My ex-husband walked in with the woman he left me for, young enough to be our daughter.” Or, in one case where the woman is Black, “I ran into my baby daddy at daycare drop-off with the bitch he left me for.” 

Back when I was twenty, a hip restaurateur hired me to beat the shit out of a bunch of brand new tables. I got to spend a whole summer attacking mahogany with heavy chains, gouging it with chisels, sanding and staining and scraping and carving imaginary lovers’ initials into it. In a matter of weeks, I was to impart to this wood the appearance of wear that decades bestow on life’s useful objects. The restaurateur, himself tastefully distressed in his fifties and much sought after, paid me to do this because aged furniture would make a new bistro feel storied and intimate. In AWEs, as so often in our world, age sits on the man like that, as atmosphere, authority, sturdiness, vitality. Even his losses—of pigment from hair, or moisture from skin, or burdensome wife and kids from life—confer a patina of value. After about the fifth AWE in a row, it begins to seem miraculous that any aging man stays with any aging woman. How can his “age” even be in the same room as hers? 

The “double standard of aging,” as Susan Sontag called it, is nothing new. What’s new is its refraction through a large language model that has recently gone emotionally bionic. From the dawn of AI until just a few years ago, the business and marketing worlds operated under the assumption, based on decades of research, that consumers are generally “algorithm averse,” that we tend to resist programmed “you might also like” suggestions, and that even where statistical prediction proved more accurate than its human counterpart (in, for example, certain medical diagnoses), people were biased in favor of subjective judgments. One paradigm-shifting moment came in 2020, when Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian published a paper in the Journal of Marketing identifying what they called the “word-of-machine” effect. Our algorithm aversion, they said, was not universal but conditional. Consumers with a “utilitarian” goal—those seeking a product to fulfill a specific, clear function, such as buying dental floss—actually tended to value and trust AI recommendations more. It was only those of us pursuing a “hedonic” goal—a sensory or emotional experience, as in a horror movie—who still preferred to hear it from a human’s mouth. 

The sorting of desire into clear “utilitarian” vs. “hedonic” modes had, at the time of Longoni and Cian’s paper, been marketing orthodoxy since the eighties, when researchers introduced the “hedonic viewpoint” as an essential tool in understanding otherwise inexplicable consumption phenomena—for example, our attraction to certain media precisely because it causes us pain. A guiding principle of self-consciously affective capitalism, the hedonic viewpoint is a kind of strategic empathy, drawing attention from the object (product) to the subject (consumer), a love-seeking being in need of emotional release. By 2026, AI has transcended its utilitarian sphere to assume, or at least enact, something like the hedonic viewpoint, its ability to mimic emotional literacy with facility and precision giving the “word-of-machine” different and more disarming valencies. Can a robot sell me a feeling now? Can it do so even while being obviously a robot?

The American “K-beauty” brands that run the most Aging Woman Emomercials—brands like Quasi, Yuri, and Koriderm—do not disclose that their ads are AI slop, as New York State law now requires, but the ads themselves disclose it. The lip sync is off, the outfits change midscene, the jump cuts jump funny, the tears dangle like hot glue, the script goes wonky: one woman is “fifty-three-forty” years old; other moisturizers on the market “evaporate like glass.” All of these dead giveaways create a new kind of distance between the ads and the companies behind them that affords the latter a certain plausible deniability. This behooves them, because AWEs go low—very low, even by ad standards. In one, our pre-glow-up heroine asks her daughter: “How can I be loved when I look like this?”     

Whom do we rage against here? Is our rage even roused? The thing is, clocking immediately that an AWE is AI, I apprehend it differently than I would a man-made ad, not so much as a brutally strategic snake-oil con job, but as a set of impressions, amalgamations, whispers from the ether. It’s like listening to a child repeat what they’ve heard the grown-ups say. I find that, for me, the “word-of-machine” effect is inverted here; I am somehow less guarded against emotional manipulation when there is no one to take creative responsibility. 

Aging Woman Emomercials go low not only sociologically but affectively, in ways that feel intimately familiar and even a bit radical in an ad context. These women are not just having a bad day, not just dysregulated. These are not the wives of most commercials in my lifetime, lightly exasperated by a juice stain or decorously anxious over debt; they are not even the indoor brooders of gentle-voiced pharmaceutical ads. These women are way, way down, in dangerous depression and perimenopausal nervous breakdown territory. They are grieving, they are having a panic attack, they are heaving and sobbing on the floor, they are disgusted with themselves, they want to crawl out of their sagging skin, they are shutting themselves away from the world, they are contemplating skipping their daughter’s wedding so as not to have to be seen in public. Like a robot’s idea of a teardrop, they are hanging by a thread. 

This blend of manosphere-style gender realpolitik and all-too-human midlife emotional breakdown confers on these AI melodramas a weird and, to me, frightening cathartic power. Women understand, from very early in life, that female aging represents social death; we spend our lives metabolizing this, and we are used to media that reflects our knowingness. We have believed ourselves acclimated, believed ourselves evolved. We know that it is puerile and morbid and weak to catastrophize a natural process. But now here are these micro dramas presenting social truism as tragic personal revelation, offering us a chance to experience afresh—that is, as children, or as nonhuman creatures, or as specific individuals—the ache and injustice of a woman’s relationship to time.      

The truth is that many of the women I know are periodically falling apart over their changing faces. Even the wise ones, even the ones who know better—especially the ones who know better, since their anxiety is compounded by guilt over their own shallowness. In an uncanny twist on the trope of the emotionless robot, here AI is openly acknowledging emotional truths—albeit hackneyed ones—that have, perhaps rightly, become distasteful to express in intelligent, ethical human company. We are what we think and say we are, so let’s not go low. But low is a real place, and by “going there” the robot enacts the promised function of the product: it makes me feel seen. “The moment,” sings one AWE woman the morning after wearing the touted collagen mask to bed, “was me alone in that mirror finally seeing myself clearly.” 

The key “moment” in every AWE claims to be about self-reclamation, confidence, “finally recognizing” yourself, but of course it is, every time, about something else. The climactic sequence that the narrative builds toward, the soaring part of the song, the fantasy’s apex, is the run-in with the man who left. The woman is post-product now, post-restoration to her authentic hot young self, and post-epiphany about the true problem: “It is not vanity,” she belts in yet another pre-chorus, “it is not in your head, it is not age, your skin is starving.”

And then there he is, at the pharmacy, at day care drop-off, at the restaurant where our heroine is awaiting her first date in years. He sees her, her face plumped and poreless as a toddler’s, and something happens to him: his eyes bulge, his eyebrows shoot up, his lips hang open; he almost does a full “awooga.” Having “expected to see the old broken face,” he finds instead a “radiant woman standing tall,” and he is so completely taken aback by the transformation that he now becomes the broken one—for a few seconds we get to revel in this image of the male gaze frozen in a paroxysm of “humina humina” stupidity. Then the woman dutifully pivots to disclaiming any desire to get him back, and does a little I-did-this-for-me shuffle into the “buy now while supplies last” conclusion. 

Recently I had my own run-in moment. I was alone at a New York City beach. I’d been there for a few hours, in nice weather, but, seeing a mass of dark clouds rolling in, I gathered my things and fast-walked the path through the dunes to the exit. I rounded a bend and there, walking just ahead of me, was the man who left two years ago. He was walking close to someone, close enough to touch arm hairs. “Hi,” I said to the back of them, and they stopped, half turned. 

Unlike the AWE men, this man did not seem at all surprised to see me. In fact, both he and his companion took my appearance so stolidly in stride that I wondered whether they had seen me earlier, perhaps from afar, and had taken pains to avoid me, not expecting the clouds to flush us out together. 

We were just reaching the end of the path as I called out, arriving at an opening in a chain-link fence where you leave the dunes and cross a field to get to the road. The woman, who was tall and muscular and looked to be at least ten years my junior, stepped aside and abstracted herself, as though we were in a museum and she had crossed to regard a painting on the opposite wall. I waved to her and she gave me a strained smile as the man knelt to put on his shoes.                

I stood there saying words, I have no idea which ones. From the ground, the man seemed to be apologizing to me for something—I must forgive him for being at this moment too distracted to properly interact, but he had recently seen a video of a person being struck by lightning, and so he was afraid of being struck by lightning himself, here, now, and he gestured to the approaching cloud shelf. For some reason, inside that moment, this fear struck me as rational.

The scene proceeded in nightmare time. Now I seemed to be apologizing for something. I didn’t mean to make him, them, uncomfortable; I could cross the field separately, and I turned and started to walk away, but after a few yards I surprised myself by turning back and yelling at them. “Peace!” I shouted rather aggressively, “peace!” But the man couldn’t hear me so he stood up and jogged toward me. “It doesn’t have to be weird,” I said, or I sang it like a little jingle as the young woman walked slowly up to join us and now he properly introduced us, and we shook hands. We walked three abreast toward the clouds that were coming to meet us. I said where I was headed for the evening and when the young woman indicated that she knew the place I nodded eagerly, “yeah, yes!” I was so grateful to her for corroborating me. “Your shoes are untied,” the woman told the man, “just letting you know,” and we all looked down at his shoelaces dragging through the grass as we walked. “I have to pee,” she said suddenly, and peeled off in the direction of the low-slung concrete building in the center of the field where the restrooms are, and the man stopped and I kept walking and right then the rain started, a few cold drops and then a torrent, sheets of it, a hydrating mask over the whole scene, and I broke into a run to my car a few blocks down and got in soaking wet and pulled the door shut.     

We want the people who left us to see how we have improved ourselves. If loving them made us better people, losing them has made us better still. We are tougher now, we have more colors to paint with: chronic dark-value sorrows, neon joys; we are more alive than we have ever been. This is what shocks me most about getting older—I keep becoming more alive. To outwardly droop and look tired at this juncture amounts to failure of representation so perverse that one can’t help imputing some intelligence to it; one feels contrapasso punished for the crime of caring about appearance. 

The Intelligence, we are told, is also becoming more alive, or at least more autonomous. I keep hearing that what we need to fear now—not far off but next year, maybe this year—is the Intelligence’s penchant for “recursive self-improvement,” which may at any time explode into violent agency, turning on us like a smitingly beautiful fifty-three-forty-year-old ex-wife whose power has been underestimated. “This is what you get,” it says, “for thinking you could watch me ironically.” 

“What is that?” my daughter asks now, eying the pink box I’m holding, whose logo resembles the killer’s mask from Scream. 

“It’s just something for my face,” I say, “to make my skin better.” 

“Don’t use it,” she says quickly, shaking her head. “Don’t believe that kind of thing.” Sometimes when an ad interrupts a program we are streaming, she will tell me, answering an unspoken prompt, what problem this ad has invented in order to sell us a solution. 

“Mom, for real,” she says now, and I see that she’s genuinely anxious about the mask, and I think how frightening it would be for her if it worked as advertised, making me unfamiliar to her. 

“You’re right,” I say. “You’re so smart. I shouldn’t have bought it. I won’t use it.” And I carry it off as though to throw it away and slip it under a pile of books in my bedroom for some night when she’s sleeping at her dad’s.