Xenia, don't take this the wrong way because I definitely consider you a role model and quite inspirational in many ways, but I think you are speaking from a privileged position and so completely fail to understand how what seems so obvious to you is so irrelevant to others.
In many ways I wish I'd had a mentor like you when I was younger. Who knows where I might be and how much I might be earning? The thing is, I didn't. My parents were lovely people but they had no money, knew no one who could even get me a bit of work experience let alone open a door to a potential career, couldn't support me at university (so I had to work through it instead of spending more time networking), and generally had a working class, parochial view on life. They are both long gone now and I will always love and admire them. They were good people and I wish there were more people like them. But if money is king (I don't think it is, but many people seem to believe that) then they did me a disservice. It has taken me years to learn and understand some of the things that your children (and I daresay you, too) knew almost instinctively from birth, and even having learned these things, some of those advantages will forever be denied me.
(I'm not unhappy with my life BTW and feel very positive about it at the moment.)
But this is an aside. The point I'm trying to make is that just as the ability to make good long-term choices in your life is affected strongly by the family and circumstances you are born into, so too is the ability to see through all the beauty crap - TV, advertising, etc. It's not just about personality and intelligence. It can't be - look at all the successful, highly intelligent, high-earning women out there who still tie themselves into knots trying to conform to this standard of youth and beauty.
And in many, many careers, they're not 'wrong' to try to do so. It doesn't matter how good they are at their jobs, how respected they are for what they do, they will still suffer as they age and lose their looks - take Kate Adie for example.
You can circumvent things to a degree by not caring personally, but if most other people care, you are still going to fall foul of it unless you are in an unusually powerful position.
And if you are brought up in a community where emphasis on appearance is normal and desirable, it can often take decades (if ever) to unlearn that and realise that what you do is actually more important. I know it sounds obvious to someone like you, but it really isn't to everyone. (And what if you never have the academic intelligence to forge a career in something that will pay you enough to make you feel good about yourself?) In fact, given the multi-billion-pound money-making machine that is the beauty industry, it would see that most people fall for it to a greater or lesser degree. This stuff is peddled from everywhere and you can't avoid it even by giving up TV or magazines (I'm like you in that respect and don't do either). You can't completely ignore billboards, shop fronts, bus sides, newspapers, or, more importantly, other people's attitudes.
Furthermore (if you are who I am pretty sure you are), you are still a very attractive woman indeed and will probably remain more attractive than most even as you age, so you're never going to be approaching this from the perspective of someone pretty ordinary looking sliding into obscurity.
I agree with you that it is far, far healthier to define your worth on what you do (not how much you earn), rather than what you look like, and this should definitely be a feminist principle. However, the way to do that IMO is to work on raising women's status generally and to get women to see through the harmful aspects of the beauty industry, not berate them for falling foul of it.