Toronto Made an Aging Cream and Tried to Get People to Use It

We will say one good thing about “OK Boomer” hitting the Supreme Court: It’s put ageism back in the public mind. 

But stereotypes are hard to change; they become mental shortcuts, and, acted out, habits. One in three Canadians admitted to treating someone differently due to age, and a 41 percent of older Canadians say they’ve felt ignored or treated as if they were invisible.

Those stats hail from the city of Toronto’s ageism awareness informational website, which provides all kinds of handy data about the world’s most socially acceptable prejudice (per the World Health Organization!). 

But who trawls gov websites for funsies? (Sidenote: FBI.gov is totally ready for that eventuality.) To promote the effort, Toronto has released a campaign for the first-ever aging cream.

“Appear more mature. Instantly,” AgingCream.ca promises. The product’s been dubbed Imagés, an anagram for “ageism.” Clever! (Except for the unnecessary accent, which technically changes the sound of the word to “image-ays.” Clearly no one from Montreal—which, when spelled Frenchly, both has and requires an accent mark—was consulted.) 

I’m impressed people were actually willing to try a product that promises to add “up to three decades to your appearance,” all in the interest of improving confidence, reliability and skillset. Maybe that bodes well. But we also hope to see follow-up campaigns over an extended period. Consistency is everything when people forget what they retweeted pretty much instantly.

The site guides you to the aforementioned informational hub, titled “Anti-Ageism in the Workplace,” which provides stats on ageism and a “relating to old people” quiz—though if you really want to take it, you’ll have to open the PDF, print it out, read the scoring instructions and do the math on your own. 

We’re working really hard not to make an “old-school” joke here, but that’s only proof of how far we have to go. Technological inefficiency is usually less about age and more about bureaucracy, as any marketing manager will tell you.