Ok, so I know that 39 isn’t technically old by most, some, a 40 year old’s standards, but it is an age which normally has women worried about looking old. I’m not one of those women. I don’t feel old. Maybe it’s the fact that I worked with college students for so many years and they kept me young or the fact that I still deal with the same skin issues that I did as a teenager, but I don’t look in the mirror and fret about things like wrinkles. Granted I have gray hair and frown lines on my forehead but I’ve had both for so long, they’re just a part of who I am. More a curse gift of genetics than a symbol of age.
I should actually say that I didn’t feel old. Not too long ago I was using the magnifying mirror to pluck my eyebrows and lo and behold I saw the beginning of crows feet. All I could think was “Woah, when did the the crows sneak in to leave their footprints near my eyes? The bastards!”
It’s funny what happens when a woman finds a flaw while staring in the mirror. We don’t step away from the offending mirror, we, instead form an obsessive attachment to it and continue to look for more.
That’s exactly what I did. I sat for another 30 minutes just picking myself apart, bit by bit. I won’t share what I found, I’ll just say the mirror time didn’t end well and sent me on a quest to find just the right anti-aging product(s) for me.
Coenzyme Q-10, peptides, retinol (huh?) are just some of the dozen ingredients in the thousands of products out there. Add to the number of products the amount of advice from my elders who think they look younger than their age and it’s a bit overwhelming.
What to do, what to do? It’s enough to send a girl running to her nearest plastic surgeon for a little botox to make all the worry lines go away.
Screw it, maybe I’ll just get rid of that pesky magnifying mirror.
March 10, 2010
Pretty on the Outside