What's age got to do with it?
Amelia Hill and Joanna hash out details of the books that teach women how to look good without going under the knife.
The self-help category has a new niche: beauty books instructing baby-boomer women how to love those bits that sag, droop and give away their advancing years.
The backlash against 'rejuvenation surgery' - plastic surgery and chemical injections that promise to turn back ageing - has begun.
"Most women can't afford or justify cosmetic surgery but get it done because society makes them so desperate and insecure about the impact of ageing." said Christopher Hopkins, author of Staging Your Comeback: A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45. "We have been programmed to believe that only things outside our control, such as surgery or injections, can truly ameliorate the impact of ageing."
Beautiful, naturally
Hopkins, a Minneapolis makeover expert, added: we have the power to change and improve what Mother Nature handed us. Imagined Raquel Welch being the face of MAC cosmetics at 62? For women today, anything is possible.' Oz Garcia, author of Redesigning 50: The No-Plastic-Surgery Guide to 21st-Century Age Defiance, agrees.
A leading New York leading nutritionist, Garcia's book promises beauty with ‘no silly, stupid diets and no crazy cosmetic surgery that makes you look grotesque.' A third book, Gracefully: Looking and Being Your Best at Any Age by American Valerie Ramsey, a 68-year-old mother of six, grandmother of seven and catwalk model, agrees that skin care, make-up, exercise and nutrition is more effective than surgery and injections.
"We still live in a youth-obsessed culture," she said. "But the key to ageing gracefully is to be proud of your age without being confined to looking it."
Role model
Ramsey says there are four rules to follow: "The first step is acceptance of the ageing process, it's natural. You still look like you, only a new you. Then you must focus on the positive; the best thing about your age is that you've grown."
Next, she says, women should find an ageappropriate role model. Finally, they should simply get on with life. "While it's fine to like the latest teen queen and even be inspired by them, an older model will usually display courage, strength, and wisdom because they have lived long enough to earn them," she said.
"Beauty is in the way a woman carries herself, in her energy and her presence."
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