You Won’t Believe What This Faux Beauty Shop Is Really Selling
A new UK pop-up shop, Timeless, is luring in passersby with promises of youth-preserving elixirs, serums, and fragrances. But what’s keeping them there is its true offering: the chance to think and talk about the issues involved in fertility and egg freezing for future IVF.
STORY: How Chemicals Used in Beauty Products May Be About to Change
“Timeless is a fictional beauty brand created to unlock the facts around egg freezing whilst also raising public debate on how these advances in biomedical science may impact on the world of work, relationships and wider society,” notes the project on its website.
The London storefront. (Photo: Timeless)
Located in a London subway station, the pop-up storefront has the clean, clinical, and well-packaged look of a mini Sephora, complete with fresh-faced sales associates in white aprons. But those women, Sarah Douglas and Amanda Gore, are actually creative directors of the Timeless campaign, supported by the Wellcome Trust, a biomedical research charity, and the London School of Economics and Political Science.
STORY: Scientists May Have Just Found the Fountain of Youth
The two became focused on the issue of egg freezing in 2014, when Facebook and Apple both announced they would offer the service as an employee benefit, and note on the website that “it is easy for women to be beguiled and confused by the mixed messages and misinformation that surrounds it.”
“We were just immediately struck by that,” Douglas told Motherboard. “It also caused so much conversation in our peer group, as women in our 30s, that we felt it was really pertinent to us and our friends.”
She and Gore note that rather than present an opinion on egg freezing, they want to educate about the facts and start a conversation. Still, points out Motherboard, “The parallels with beauty products… suggest a product that’s promising too much for uncertain results—and the reality that some women will nevertheless be willing to pay the cost to take the chance.”
A visual example of how a woman’s fertility declines over time. (Photo: Timeless)
The women said they’d been surprised at how little some of their peers knew about fertility, believing that it was possible to keep your ovaries “young” by living a healthy lifestyle when in fact their viability naturally decreases with age. So to the end of spreading knowledge, Timeless is essentially an exhibit offering details on the following: the egg-freezing process, success rates, age-related fertility facts, and a discussion of societal pressures (through aptly named fictional perfumes including “Eau So Pressured”).
The social-discussion perfume, Pause Absolut. (Photo: Timeless)
Through “shopping” experiences at Timeless, Douglas and Gore hope to inspire visitors to think about some of the following questions, according to its website: “Could it be as revolutionary to women’s life choices as The Pill? Or, it could become yet another social expectation that reinforces the message that women are solely responsible for fertility?”
Further, the women note, “Timeless was born out of an ambition to address the gaps in information and meaningful discussion on a topic that could have a significant impact on women and society in the future. Through Timeless we aim to remove some of the taboo that surrounds reproductive issues, and encourage women — and men — to have informed conversations about an area of life that affects us all.”
