40 Is The New 25?

When I was a small child, my mom worked as an Avon lady. Every month she'd receive her order, huge boxes filled with glamorously-packaged potions and concoctions of every kind, all promising to make their user gorgeous, radiant, youthful and everything else you can think of . There were always lots of samples for me to play with, teeny tiny lipsticks and little envelopes filled with magic creams and exotically-perfumed towelettes. I couldn't wait for those boxes to arrive. For me, this was heaven, so much so that it led to a career as a makeup artist and a lifelong passion for everything related to the beauty industry. I am always on the hunt for new (and often outlandish) products or techniques that I can test on myself and gossip to my girlfriends about. I also have very strong interests in alternative therapies, and the importance of nutrition and exercising. Of course exercise is one of the fountains of youth, but I still have a lot of 'hope in a jar', whether it be a some crazy-exclusive expensive eye cream imported from some obscure, unheard of place or just a cheap blush from the drugstore. I want to try it all.

'Forty is the new twenty-five' is a phrase I have been hearing a lot these days, and it makes me giggle every time I think about it because it makes me only twenty years old. It makes me feel a kind of silly optimism, and everyone I tell it to seems to have the same reaction. Would I want to be twenty years old again? Well...just the thought sends my brain flashing back to waitressing hell, crappy boyfriends, and eating Ramen noodles in my cramped apartment that I furnished with discarded items I found on the street, so..no. Would I like to look and feel twenty-five by the time I'm forty? You betcha.