As beauty and wellness continue to merge, anti-aging has taken on a new frontier: longevity.
At Fairchild Media Group’s Wear House at SXSW, Dr. Deepak Chopra, along with Charles Rosier and Melissa Eamer, respective chief executive officers of Augustinus Bader and Modern Age, fleshed out beauty and health’s next generation in conversation with Jenny B. Fine, executive beauty editor of WWD and Beauty Inc.
Aging is contingent upon time, but Chopra said that the ticking clock is more elastic than consumers think. “I’m working on the nature of fundamental reality,” he said, “and the biological origins of consciousness and how consciousness modulates the experience of time, and therefore affects how long we live.”
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Among that research, Chopra said research into psychedelics “shows that reordering of space and time and causality is possible.”
Rosier posited that that has applications in beauty. “Everything is interconnected, and [Augustinus Bader] is just trying to be a small piece of the equation. Bader’s approach was a discovery on awakening your own stem cells, but it’s all about unlocking self-healing, and unlocking the capacity of your body to do certain things.”
Modern Age “helps people address, in a holistic manner, all of the things that change as you age,” Eamer said. “We do everything from caring for your outside to caring for your inside, and help you understand that those are all connected. This mind-body connection is important; there’s been a lot of research on how optimistic you are about the future having a real impact on everything from your liver function to your strength and how long you live.”
Some of the physiological consequences of stress, Chopra added, include increased heart rate and diminished immune system. “If you keep saying you don’t have enough time, you will run out of time. On the other hand, if you say you have all the time in the world, or if you fall in love and time doesn’t exist, you see time is reordered according to how we see the world and ourselves.”
Chopra also had suggestions for tapping into that shift in mindset. “There are ways to stimulate the vagus nerve through breathing techniques, through kriyas, bandhas and mudras and yoga postures that actually slow everything down,” he said. “Right now, the world is in what we call sympathetic overdrive, which means too much adrenaline, too much cortisol.”
Modern Age taps into different modalities as well, which are driven by Western innovations. “We will do neurofeedback therapy where we can get a brain map and understand how your brain waves are behaving,” Eamer said. “If you’re new to meditation or techniques like that, there are ways that we can help you understand how to get your brainwave patterns back to an optimal level.”
Added Rosier, “Technology is moving at an incredibly fast rate, and the limitations today are more regulatory. When things become more medical, the procesess of approval are longer. But there are so many.”