The New Thirty

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!”

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