Facing the Facts: She’s Over 35 and Ready to Take a Powder

The other day I approached a cosmetics counter at a major department store in a mall near my home. It was a Saturday, and I looked . . . like hell.

A youthful-looking woman wearing dramatically applied eye shadow and a surgically inspired lab coat was standing behind the cosmetics counter. She did indeed look “specially trained.”

She smiled gently and a look of benevolence crossed her face. She once had a mother, I could tell.

Then she gave me a more scrutinizing, clinical look. She asked me what I used to wash my face, so I gave her the name of the soap that I have been conveniently buying at my local membership warehouse store for years.

Well. Just goes to show that a little forthrightness can go a long way toward brightening a stranger’s day.

What I’m saying is the woman was practically rolling around on the floor she was laughing so hard. Tears could have been rolling down her cheeks, I’m not sure. I figured she was going to call her boyfriend and tell him about it on her break.

Yet she recovered fast. This is part of her special training, no doubt.

Obviously, I had arrived at this particular cosmetics counter not a moment too soon. From the way she was carrying on, I figured my personalized beauty attendant was about to alert security to bolt the exits, for my own good.

Suddenly she lost the clinical glare and transformed herself into Vanna White, sweeping her hands over an array of products that were designed for complexions especially like my own. Vanna did some quick calculations and then described my skin as a “type.”

But what she really meant was old.

I mean, we are talking clarion call.

Oh sure, I have seen those skin care ads for “women over 35,” the cosmetic industry’s demarcation line for feminine vitality and youth. I have never bought into this defeatist line of thinking myself.

Plus, these ads are way too discreet. Enough with the sheer veils brushing gently across a woman’s skin or the fake dew drops plopping off a rose.

What I’m saying is this “women over 35” business has been easy to ignore. For one thing, a woman can take only so much subtlety.

I’m still wondering when all the strangers in my life got together and decided to start calling me ma’am instead of miss .

But then the other day, while flipping though a seriously insightful magazine from the East Coast--Cover boy: George Bush taking a brisk walk--I came across a headline that stopped me cold.

“Is Your Skin Aging Faster Than You Are?” it said.

And a steely fear gripped me then.

Let’s just say that suffocating under mounds of dead skin would not be my preferred way to go.

(I’m still holding out for the bedroom scene surrounded by my loved ones where my 19-year-old great-granddaughter will say something touching like, “And your hair, it always looks great!”)

So, clearly, I needed a cream or an unguent in a general sense. I was thinking of something with time-released youth cells activated by microscopic computer chips in each drop.

For an intensified formula, I wouldn’t even mind if the name was not in French. What I’m getting at is French is romantic and all, but for an unguent I was thinking of more of a no-nonsense approach. Maybe something in German or Japanese would be nice.

And forget the recycled, earthy motif. I don’t want to save the Earth, I want to save myself.

Those natural lines like to talk a good game, but somehow “tiny jojoba beads gentled with oats and Italian talc, nettles and other purifiers” do not quite sound up to the task at hand.

This is why I went to the mall. I needed somebody who had been specially trained to attend to my beauty needs. And Vanna would have to do.

She had my skin pegged as “dry,” but then, wait . . . yes! She said she saw a bit of a shine to my nose. Far as I could make out, this meant that there was definitely some activity under there, some production of some sort, some life!

So I bought some cream. It’s supposed to do marvelous things. Then, what the hell, I bought some “clarifying lotion” too. Because, I mean, I like how that sounds.

Now you can see that I have my priorities straight. A visit to the cosmetics counter can clarify a lot of things.