It started with YouTube. I was looking for people to watch. Not necessarily people making videos about being over 40, or menopause, or midlife, or any of the other things we’re apparently supposed to be interested in once we hit a certain age. I just wanted to find people around my age who were making interesting things and putting them out into the world. And I struggled.
Of course, there are plenty of older creators on YouTube. But they seemed surprisingly difficult to find. The algorithm was very good at showing me people in their twenties and thirties, and while I have absolutely nothing against youngsters (I was one once, after all!), I began to wonder where everyone my age was. Because I knew they had to be there.
I’m 50, and I’ve spent most of my adult life making things in one form or another. I’ve written books, made videos, taken photographs, built websites, sewn things, experimented with filmmaking and, more recently, fallen down increasingly deep rabbit holes involving AI. And I’m certainly not the only person in my age group doing interesting things.
In fact, I started noticing just how many people over 40 are still creating, learning, experimenting and starting new things. They’re writers, photographers, artists, makers, filmmakers, podcasters, musicians, designers, entrepreneurs, YouTubers and all sorts of other things that don’t fit neatly into a single box.
So I started thinking: wouldn’t it be brilliant if there was somewhere we could actually find them? That’s where WRINKLES came from.
It’s not a website about being over 40. It’s not about telling you how to dress, how to look younger or how to navigate your “best years”. And it’s certainly not about pretending that younger people aren’t interesting. They are. There are some extraordinarily talented young creators out there. It’s simply about giving people who’ve been around a bit their own place to be discovered.
Because I think there’s something particularly interesting about creating when you’ve got a few decades of life behind you. You’ve accumulated experiences, skills, stories, opinions, mistakes and probably an alarming collection of half-finished projects. You might be starting something completely new, reinventing yourself, or finally getting around to the thing you’ve wanted to do for years. And I want WRINKLES to be a place where all of that is welcome.
You don’t need thousands of followers. You don’t need to call yourself a “content creator”. You don’t even need to know exactly what you’re doing yet. You just need to be making something and putting a little bit of yourself out into the world.
Most of all, I wanted somewhere that made it easier to find your people. Because perhaps there are quite a lot of us out here, quietly making things and wondering where everybody else is. So that’s why I created WRINKLES.
Maybe you’re one of them.
Suzy Turner, Founder of WRINKLES
www.suzyturner.com