What to do about WRINKLES?

After yoga, when I’m rolling up my mat, seems like often a GSG reader comes over to chat. Tell me their green smoothie experience, ask what to do to help a friend struggling with health problems, ask me when the group buy ends. Stuff like that.

Recently, Cheryl, a 53-yo, very fit breast cancer survivor, had a new one:

Cheryl: What do you do about wrinkles?

Me: Ummm. How about, you love them?

Cheryl’s not buying it. She doesn’t want wrinkles apparently. She wants to be 53 but look 33. She tells me that it’s easy for me to say, because I don’t have them. (Yes I do, around my eyes—they show up when I laugh and smile. Which I will continue to do as much as possible.)

I point out to her that, first, I’m younger than she is. And second, while I play tennis and don’t use sunscreen, I don’t have a half-acre, award-winning yard in the summer, and work as Ski Patrol all winter, like she does. Both of which cause year-round high sun exposure here in the Rockies where we’re 4200 feet above sea level and the air is thin.

She won’t want to hear that I don’t have some magic product, except organic, extra-virgin coconut oil, which I slather all over my face at night. I love it. I want to make a big vat of it and roll around in it. Its healing properties aren’t just something I read about in a book. My family and I have experienced them, and I’ve heard from hundreds of readers about what high-quality medium-chain fatty acids do for them.

I say this:

“What if you took all the energy you’re giving to fretting about it, and put it instead into reflecting on all the great stuff in your life that gave you those beautiful lines?”

I mean, at the end of the day, we live a healthy lifestyle (which Cheryl does), and then shouldn’t we enjoy being the age we are? 53 is awesome, if you can do a headstand in yoga like Cheryl can, and most of the 33-year olds wish they had her loveliness. With lines or not.

If a much younger guy flirts with me (cougar hunting is all the rage), I confess that I feel insecure. If tell him my age, I’ve had a dozen say, “Who cares? A beautiful woman is beautiful at any age.”

Why can’t we just OWN that? When we’re 63, we’re going to look back at 53 and wish we’d enjoyed how young and beautiful we were.

I think women with experience-lined faces are gorgeous. Sexy, pretty, beautiful, and cute, too. (My friend Tim says there are five types of attractive women—the ones I just listed. My friends and I play a game of slotting celebrities and people we know into those categories according to Tim’s definitions and examples.)

What you’ve accomplished and experienced in your life is written on your face. Why is that a bad thing? Why do we inject dead botulism into our face to erase that? To flat-line all expression?

Use plenty of cold-pressed coconut oil on your skin. Your skin, and then your bloodstream, just eats it up. It’s skin food. But let’s embrace the much-maligned “fine lines and wrinkles.” We’ve earned them. They’re only a “bad” thing if we let them be. It’s all in the mind. How much control are you going to give popular culture, over your heart and mind?

Today, wrinkles. Tomorrow let’s talk about scars.

Posted in: Green Smoothies, Mind/Body Connection