Things are getting serious now.
It’s time to break out the free samples.
This milestone came about during coincidental yet pointed timing.
A few days ago, I saw a row of vertical wrinkles next to my left eyebrow. Like I always do, I pushed the skin back into place to make the wrinkles disappear.
Yet this time, they didn’t. They stayed there.
I pulled the skin in another direction while opening my mouth and eyes wide to stretch the face. Then I released.
Nope, they were still there.
With a sigh of resignation, I realized I am going further into that point of no return. Of course, I’ve been there for quite a while, but until now, could always reposition everything on my face or touch up the makeup to hide the signs of aging. This time, they persisted.
A couple of days later, and this was the coincidence of timing, the new three-door all-mirrored (inside and out) medicine cabinet was installed in the bathroom. This thing is beautiful. It’s a true work of art. It is well made, and sparkles and invites you to indulge in storing pretty containers and looking at your pretty face. It was a $1,250 piece I got on an amazing clearance price of $207, so you can imagine how smitten I am with it.
Once it was installed, it just elevated the bathroom to a whole new level of glamour. That, along with white towels hanging on gorgeous new chrome towel racks and sparkly matching silvery mirrored soap dispensers and a few other delights, make our bathroom the place to be now in our house.
When you go into our bathroom now, there’s no escaping yourself, because that mirrored cabinet is so big. And we have another mirrored cabinet on the other side, above the other sink.
With a combination of bemusement and a sinking feeling of bad timing, I realized that this would have been a luxurious medicine chest to have during the first half of my life, but it would be a mocking constant reminder of the aging process during the second half of my life.
I repeatedly offered the new chest to my teenage daughter, but she kept insisting that she wanted to keep the original chest on the other wall for herself.
“You have more stuff to store than I do,” she explained.
“You are in the prime of life. The teenage years are the years to lavish in mirrors,” I told her.
So here I am with my 2-foot-high, 3-foot-wide new cabinet filled with pretty pastel colored jars of various sorts of face creams. These are the face creams that come as special gifts whenever I have bought the Super Duty Retin-A Face Preserver I have been buying since I was 25.
That Face Preserver is expensive, but I thank God, it is one useful foresight I had and investment I have been making from a young age. At 25, when my skin was great, I shuddered in horror at the thought of being covered in wrinkles. I figured the wrinkles would probably come at the old age of 30, at which point I would probably need a facelift.
The way I researched any major purchase, I went to the library and looked through the issues of Consumer Reports until I found what I was hoping to find: A study of face creams. The Super Duty Retin-A Face Preserver was listed at the very top of the rankings, and I have been using it ever since.
When you buy makeup at the makeup counters during the special offer times, you get cute little bags with jars of other stuff. I never used the other stuff, because once the first thing is on my face it seemed like enough.
Now, though, assorted face creams line the glass shelves: Resilience Youth Revival, Power Face Multi-Effect, Revitalizing Premiere Day Indulgence, Advanced Lift & Firm, Anti-Aging Eight-Hour Regeneration Serum …
So now I have to start getting ready for the day even earlier, to wait for the Retin-A Face Preserver to dry before slathering on one of those creams and then wait for that cream to dry before putting on the face primer which is some sort of foundation for your foundation.
And then I can start the makeup.
