Baby boomers may not have a corner on the market for a vital need to stay fresh but they definitely have set an impressive standard for creating a virtual landslide of goods and services to attend to that need. The search to look young in baby boomers has ended in an explosion of profits in the cosmetic and cosmetic surgery markets. It's easy to criticise the desire of baby boomers to would like to see themselves as young as simple vanity. But it goes far deeper than that.

It does not take a large amount of research or research to see that baby boomers grounded their identities in the youth movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Before the boomer generation exploded like a generational volcano, there truly was no youth movement. But in the 1960s, when youth culture almost took over American and indeed world culture, everything changed for baby boomers and that change was never really reversed.

The culture of that time that now seems long ago, was one of the devotion of youth and toys such as Barbie And Friends of course. That need to put age on a pedestal and worship everything about being young has permeated the culture even as the boomer generation moved into middle age and now is on the edge of creating the biggest retirement generation ever.

Not all of the youth worship that is simple to document in baby boomers is about looking attractive and dreading the physical changes of growing older. Some of what boomer's adore about the concept of youth has to do with the idealism and the commitment to causes that isn't unusual in young people. The will to change the world and to be a force to make mankind better was a part of what made the new youth culture in the 1960s so unique. And because those values are laudable, we really can't completely condemn the desire by baby boomers to stay young.

So that the search to stay young often manifests itself in cosmetic attempts to look young. You can just about understand the appeal. We all like to look great. But the genuine source of youth isn't a tight butt and abs and smooth, wrinkle free skin. The phrase "you are as young as you feel" is usually scoffed at by baby boomers as a inexpensive cop out. And it can be used to have an excuse to behave younger than you are and perhaps want to socialise with younger people in an inappropriate way. But it could also reflect that an inner youthfulness which is fueled by a young outlook on life and a basic policy of good health and exercise will keep any person spy and crucial well into their senior years.

It is when baby boomers mix those components of "inner youthfulness" with their cosmetic efforts to stay young that they actually do retain much of their youth beyond what their years would report. Everybody has met an elderly woman or man who is so lively and fun that they make you feel older than they are. The glint in the eye, the interest about everything life has to supply and that anticipation and idealism that you ordinarily associate with teenagers is truly galvanizing when it is being voiced by an older citizen.

This is the genuine youth movement that the baby boomer generation is pathfinding and home based business entrepreneurs are making money from. It is more than dying the hair or using Botox and wrinkle creams. It is about being powerful role models to the youth coming up that they don't have to give up on their dreams and that their idealism and excitement in living can prosper regardless of what age they are . And if that is the legacy of the baby boomer generation, it is a fine ethic for them to leave behind for generations yet to come to enjoy.