On a recent morning, I was inches from the 3x magnified mirror that sits on my vanity studying my eyelids (do not recommend). One’s a bit droopier than the other, and ever since noticing it a couple years back, I can’t stop seeing it. On this particular morning, I’d accidentally slept face-down (oops), and it was decidedly more noticeable than usual. My mind went straight to: I need to do something about this.
Within minutes, I was down the rabbit hole of before-and-afters—searching treatments, studying results, trying to determine whether I needed actual surgery.
Andddd THIS is what happens when we spend too much time studying our own faces: examining them up close, under bright lights, isolating the forehead wrinkle, the sagging jawline, the dark spot—honing in on a feature that seems to have changed overnight. Once we’ve decided something is a problem, the internet is more than happy to offer a solution.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand, and that’s totally changed the way I think about beauty and aging: other people don’t experience us one feature at a time. Our friends don’t freeze-frame our faces or zoom in on the asymmetry between our eyelids. They experience us in motion—laughing, reacting, telling a story, walking into a room. They see us as a whole person.
Whenever I start obsessing over a new sign of aging or a feature about myself that I’m not in love with, I call to mind the most beautiful women I know. What makes them magnetic is that they’re curious about the world, engaged in their creativity, generous with their attention, and completely themselves. Their faces are expressive because they’re expressing something authentic. That’s what draws you in.
Yes, I still have my moments—ie. my droopy eyelid spiral, and I haven’t totally ruled out a bleph sometime in the next few years. But if I decide to do it, it’ll be with the right expectations: it’ll lift one feature of my face, but it won’t magically make me more confident, magnetic, or even more youthful. No procedure can do that.
Last week, I launched The Forty Files, a new series about aging, identity, and stepping into our best chapter yet. And my relationship with beauty is definitely one of the biggest shifts happening for me in this decade. I’ll be honest: I naturally skew toward extreme vanity. Sorry, it’s true!! (lol) I’ve loved makeup and beauty since I was a little girl, and left unchecked, I could spend hours reading about aesthetic treatments and watching beauty tutorials. But in my thirties, that interest started to become tangled up with fear. Aging was something to delay or conceal—and every new sign of it made me feel like I should be fixing it.
At 42, I do have more visible signs of aging—but I have far less fear about them. I’m not trying to recover a version of my younger face. I just want to look like the most well-rested, well-nourished, fully present version of myself.
So, in today’s Forty Files, I’m sharing the beauty rules I follow at 42: how I eat and exercise, the sleep and stress practices that affect how I look and feel, and the skincare, devices, and treatments that are officially worth my time and money. Plus, my honest approach to Botox, sun protection, and melasma—and the things I’ve decided simply aren’t worth it.
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