Looking appropriate as you age, while not giving in to stretch pants, low-rider jeans and scrunchies, is a challenge taken up by Christine Schwab in The Grown-Up Girl’s Guide to Style. Schwab, a fashion contributor to Live with Regis and Kelly, Oprah, Today, Entertainment Tonight and E! , believes that women over 40 should look sexy and vital and feel confident, and she offers her simple principles for achieving these goals in major style areas including clothes (disaster #1: nakedness); hair (goodbye, hairspray and helmet head); face and skin (white Chiclet teeth take years off, and so does a light tinted moisturizer); and makeup (more brush, less trowel). Schwab also covers the aging inner self, discussing brain health, menopause, maintaining marriages and stepfamilies and other relationships, and fitting exercise and sex into a changing lifestyle. The do and don’t photos scattered throughout make our own less-than-graceful aging a little more tolerable, too.
Deanna Larson is a writer in Nashville.