예쁜 서른, 섹시한 마흔 (Pretty Thirty, Sexy Forty)
21.
예쁜 서른, 섹시한 마흔, 피현정.
So this appears to be my year for reading airhead books really seriously, and I hope I am not boring the pants off my friends.
Mostly this says all the stuff all the other 'beauty manual' things say - drink lots of water, exercise, sleep more, take care of your skin, get regular haircuts, develop an eye for what looks good on your body, and so on. The one thing that is different in this is that it treats freckles like they're acne scars - that is, you must hunt down each freckle because it's a 'flaw' and you must cover it up with base, tone-evener, spot concealer, general concealer and foundation. Holy shit. If i actually tried to do this every morning I would not get to work until lunchtime.
I kept reading because I realized that my grandmother followed all these suggestions and said a lot of the same things about taking care of yourself as a woman and how to present yourself in the best way. She always wore Chanel No. 5 perfume, wore the right colors in the right cuts, mixed and matched open-market clothes with items from department stores, always wore the right amount of jewelry. She tried to teach me the exact face massage to prevent sagging and wrinkles and 'bad' coloring that's taught in this book and I kind of didn't listen because it seemed like way too much work. Of course, I now think if I had started when she told me to, at 21, I wouldn't feel this current pressing need to buy wrinkle lotions and face firming creams.
Almost every one of my acquaintances who met my grandmother in my teens said to me, with a sort of awe, "Your grandmother is so stylish and dresses so well," and I was always sort of like, Really? Because all of us at the time in my little unit of six people were locked into a totally dysfunctional whirligig and so as I was completely occupied with survival, I did not notice things like how well my grandmother dressed, what great colors she picked for her pale complexion, how well she had maintained her skin into her seventies. That it wasn't frivololity or desperation or self-absorption that made her be so strict about never leaving the house without making sure her foundation (I think she used Revlon and was pale enough to use their "Ivory" color, and Coty translucent powder) and perfume and jewelry were how they ought to be. These negative thoughts about feminine primping all come from my mother, who was part of a black-turtleneck why-do-women-need-to-breed-babies smoke-cigarettes-and-go-home-drunk generation of college women that was a big fad/trend/phenomenon in the 70s in Korea.
So I thought a lot about my grandmother reading this book, and that maybe I get my very definite tastes and preferences from her, and that I am really a lot like my grandmother, too. I'm tough and outspoken, and I've been told I give off a very intimidating, "Don't even think about messing with me" attitude, but on the other hand I really love perfume and sparkly little jewels and want to dress just so.
I wish my grandmother was here to see me have fun with being a woman, with presenting myself as the woman I want to be. She would enjoy how I dress now. I wish we had had more time.