Aging gracefully is a topic of conversation among my friends these days. We are all late thirty or early forty-somethings who are either paying for our youthful sun folly (yes, tanning beds are bad) or just realizing it takes about an hour for our face to settle into an acceptable shape in the morning. I was aging gracefully until my eye doctor told me I needed glasses. After putting on my new frames, I actually SEE my lines, wrinkles, and what looks like the feet of a thousand crows who have danced around my eyes. So who is this Grace person and how can I age like her?

A friend of mine, who is thirty-seven and has peaches and cream skin, asked me if I’ve had botox. No, I haven’t. She said I have no wrinkles on my forehead. I lifted up my bangs to reveal that yes, I have wrinkles, but instead of botox, I got bangs. Far safer.  She proceeds to tell me about her other friends’ botox results and the pressure to keep up with the Joneses and how she really doesn’t want to get botox but what can she do? How can her skin look better? What do I use? (Kari Gran organic products to start with.) Here’s the deal – she has gorgeous skin. It is beautiful AND it is aging. 

The phrase “aging gracefully” consists of two words and one of them is aging. Many women fear looking old. Do you know what I fear? Becoming a caricature version of my thirty-year-old self, and perhaps botox is a gateway to other procedures that will leave me looking perpetually startled. I advocate looking as good as you can but at some point, we all must age and go through menopause, so eat well, exercise and nourish your mind and skin. Yes, it sounds simplistic but think of all of the lovely, truly lovely, older people in your life. How many of them do you love because they’ve had amazing plastic surgery?

Aging gracefully, if this is your goal, is all about confidence, inner beauty, self-worth (meaning, yes, take the time to shower in the morning and wear something other than yoga pants all day; but if the two aforementioned things make you happy, then go for it with enthusiasm) and accepting that with age comes wisdom and laugh lines and worry lines and all the markings of a life well-lived.

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