We’ve often been told that appearance is linked to success: first impressions stick and they affect how we’re treated. Women tend to take these admonitions seriously. After all, so much of their place in history has been the consequence of their looks. Promise a woman a “fresher” appearance and she will spend her last dollar on a face cream rather than a loaf of bread. If the treatment is ancient, passed down from Cleopatra, we women go for it. If the treatment is modern and high-tech, we women go for it.
What matters is the promise. Females who can afford paying $1,000 for a two-and-a-half hour message will bear the expense and assume the price enhances the treatment’s magic. Or, we’ll allow strangers to stick pins in our faces and pay enormous fees for the pain, swelling and bruising that follows, hoping to emerge looking like Audrey Hepburn. (“Seoul Searching,” by Jamie Rosen, Town&Country, September 2016, pgs. 130-132.)
What we can’t escape is that we age differently. My mother is going strong at 100. My father died at 68. My genes are a crapshoot, so I work at a healthy life.
Unlike Olivia de Havilland (Blog 7/20/16), I don’t mind sharing my health secrets, if anyone cares. The cosmetic industry thrives on hype and deserves to be debunked. My face cream? Petroleum jelly. (Click) I eat a variety of fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables. Blueberries, for example, have so many virtues, it’s hard to count them. (Click)
For the last several years, I’ve included a pomegranate supplement to my daily regime. I’m too lazy to dig out all those little seeds that look they should be strung as a necklace rather than eaten. I take a pill. Recently, I’ve learned those little red seeds have powerful magic when it comes to longevity: there is a molecule within pomegranates that is transformed by microbes in the gut, allowing muscle cells to protect themselves against one of the major causes of aging. (Click)
Estee Lauder would have you believe beauty is skin deep. She’s wrong. Beauty begins with what we put into our bodies. Fruits, nuts and vegetables, not diamonds, are a girl’s best friends. They’re pretty good for men, too.
(Originally published 9/8/16)
