My Darling Quarantine: 30 days to looking 10 years younger

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

30 Days to 10 years younger--10 minute tips. Tip 2: Update your eyebrows

Nothing updates and refreshes your face quicker and more thoroughly than a good eyebrow reshaping. Unfortunately, eyebrows are an area where Boomers are sometimes a bit clueless. After all, many of us came to age during a dark age for eyebrows. (Literally. Scroll down and check out the pictures.)

Women who came of age in the 1990s and 2000s have a sort of automatic eyebrow savvy that leaves me feeling envious. I mean, they get to be a lot younger and they're all hip to the waxing, tweezing, brow color, brow gel thing? It hardly seems fair.

But here's the crucial point. Women in their 20s and 30s wouldn't dream of letting their eyebrows go au naturel. And that means we shouldn't either.

Show me an eyebrow, and I'll tell you which decade it was from. Do you want the wrong decade waggling over your eyes? Of course not. Scroll down for a brief history of the female eyebrow, from the 1920s to the present:

And just as we come full circle with the penciled-on Dietrich brow, the pendulum swings and thicker, more dramatic brows come back into style.

What decade are your brows? (Please don't say the 1970s. Or 1980s.) Remember, if Joan Crawford could update her eyebrows,

and she did

You can, too!

Joan? Groucho Marx called. He wants his eyebrows back.

For complete instructions on how to pluck your eyebrows, see About.com's article here.

For more on current brow shapes and what not to do, check out Brow Magic by my latest blog discovery, The Underfunded Heiress.

Monday, March 01, 2010

The Beauty Boomer Manifesto

Hello, invisible internet friends!

I have a confession to make. I'm older than you are.

I'm 53, and at 53, I have to work twice as hard and spend twice the money and time to look half as good as I did when I was 27. Well, I have two options; I can continue to fight the good fight, or I can give up.

I plan to keep fighting.

I plan to keep fighting because I feel better about myself when I do. I plan to keep fighting because it makes my husband and children feel better about me. Most important, I plan to keep fighting because it shows the world that I'm still in the game. My glory days are not over; they're just beginning.

Like it or not, people judge you by your looks--and they do it all the time.

One of the things they judge is your age. Another is your perceived level of hipness.

Here's the deal: age and hipness do not have to co-relate. Perceived age is the combination of the impression made by your size, silhouette, complexion, coloring, grooming, clothes, accessories, and makeup. Some of these things can be easily fixed. Others you have to live with. But hipness? Looking in the know? Can easily be tweaked. And that makes you come across as younger.

It takes work. You have to leave your comfort zone. Because let's face it; your comfort zone is frumpy. It's the same hair style for 20 years. It's the overcoat you bought in 1995 that still has plenty of wear in it. It's glasses from 2004.

And frumpiness sneaks up on you. Like age, a lack of hipness doesn't happen overnight. You get busy with other things, and you gradually lose touch. You look up and the 90s--the decade you were hoping to catch up on because babies and graduate school made you miss most of them--are already being revived.

Now, I may be a recovering frump, but at least I've developed some taste and discrimination over the years. Forty years of reading fashion magazines tends to have that effect. In this blog, I'm planning on sharing what I've learned.

I also want to find out what you've learned. What has worked; what hasn't. Some of you posted comments back when I first starting moving in this direction. I've got several posts in draft that are dealing with these issues, so please keep the comments coming!

Elsewhere:

Poppy at BlogHer BeautyHacks:

Shimmery Makeup: Not Just for Teens

Nail Polish Trends for Spring, 2010

Upcoming:

I. The Five Cs of keeping your look fresh: