What the hell is up with the contortions about what age is what?
I got it first almost ten years ago from an OBGYN who was fitting me with an IUD and scolding me about my weight, saying that biologically I was more like my grandparents in their late teens, so I should be careful. I never quite understood that. Three generations isn’t enough to promote a change in aging that dramatic. I do appear younger than my grandparents did at my age, but that’s because I am more careful about sun and don’t smoke. That’s about it. I don’t look younger than my non-smoking mother did at my age — and that’s a time period about which I have quite clear memories, as I was already an adult.
It hit me again recently when I was looking up long hair care techniques. I’m a swimmer, I wear my hair about waist length, and I dye my hair. Since it’s quite chemically-abused, I was checking some stuff out.
There was the usual advice that when a woman hits forty she should cut her hair (anyone really wanna bet that in six months I’ll be sporting a short hairstyle? REALLY???? Sort of impending chemo-therapy, and using my hair to make a wig, we’re talking SERIOUS improbability)
Then I ran across this article that explained that it’s okay for a woman past forty to wear her hair long “because forty is the new thirty.”
No, forty is still forty. And it’s okay to wear long hair under one condition: That you want to.
I always liked Gloria Steinem’s retort to the reporter who told her she didn’t look like she was forty.
“This is what forty looks like!”