Staging Your Comeback by Christopher Hopkins arrived yesterday and I read it straight through.

The book’s really aimed at the post-menopausal reader - the youngest women featured are about 48, and most are in their mid-50s to 60s (Rici, seen here before and after, is 63). But don’t let that put you off if you’re any age over 35 - there’s still a lot of valuable information in here, especially if you’re feeling frumpy or in a rut.

Christopher Hopkins is known as ‘the makeover guy’ but he started out as a hairdresser. Importantly, that means he’s dealt with clients and he understands how (and why) women can be totally intransigent about changing their look. He can also be merciless, which is useful. Camp as a nine-bob note and amusingly full of himself, he started out believing himself an ugly duckling and didn’t begin to blossom till later in life. That is something he and I share, and I note that he fully understands how received messages from your childhood can hamper your personal style long after you become an adult.

The book is designed to be interactive with a website he’s set up, so you can give feedback and suggestions (possibly for later editions), and also download forms to fill in, which also figure in the back of the book. You’ll need these because throughout there are a fun bunch of quizzy tickbox things to fill in (I love this kind of stuff) to work out your style personality, your ’shadow’ personality, your body shape etc. Interestingly, he looks as closely at your horizontal shape as at your vertical shape, which is rare. This is the kind of thing you only tend to learn about when you sew garments, but it’s useful to understand how to dress when you’re long in the upper body but short in the waist, for instance. Many women’s shapes change with age - protruding belly, flatter backside etc - and he deals very well with these issues.

There’s a lot of sound advice here on how to update the look you’ve always had: how if you’ve always been a classic dresser you can end up boring; if you’re a romantic or dramatic dresser you can end up as mutton dressed as lamb; if you’re an ‘innovative’ you need to tone down your zaniness with age. He doesn’t deal with fashion trends but focuses instead on clothes. The quizzes enable you to quickly identify what kind of dresser you are, and pointers are given to help you find your way in the future.

In case you were wondering, I came out as a classic dresser with an innovative ’shadow’ side and I think that’s very true. Two thirds of my wardrobe is well-cut basics and the other third is vintage clothes and handmade jewellery. I also scored quite high on casual, and that’s because of my lifestyle, which is a jeans and t-shirts sort of life.

The advice in the make-up section you can mostly get elsewhere, except you will not see anywhere a better description (with pix) of how to shade your eyes if you have drooping eyelids. This is the thing that sends thousand of women screaming for a blepharoplasty, but here you’re shown a really great technique to hide it. He’s also adamant about softer lip colour, which is very sound. In general, though, I found the make up too heavy, which is something I notice all the time in US publications - European women simply don’t wear this much slap. He doesn’t mention products at all, so if you want this kind of advice, go to ‘How not to look old’ by Charla Krupp, which details the best foundations, primers, blusher and eye makeup.

The section on hair is golden - he really does know about cut and colour and their transformative effect. And he is blunt about grey hair - it makes you look older. Striking maybe, interesting maybe, but older - it’s your choice. Many of the haircuts featured show an uplifting effect to counteract a drooping face which I found very interesting.

The before and after section at the back, featuring mainly women in their 50s, is so transformative you can hardly believe they’re the same people (would you guess that Nancy, above, in her frumpy cardi was the same woman as the babe on the right?). No surgery and no Botox - nothing other than clothes, make-up, hair and sometimes some weight loss and these women rewind the clock by 20 years. This section is truly inspirational and it’s a relief to see these makeovers done on women of normal height and weight.

Above all, it’s a peppy book - upbeat about ’second act’ women and their potential, and worth reading to buck yourself up (and to make you feel ashamed you don’t spend more time in the gym). Probably the next-best thing to having a personal consultation.

Staging Your Comeback is available from  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

The girls and I got together the other night and at one point the conversation turned to facial hair

As women age, and particularly as oestrogen levels drop, the testosterone that’s naturally in our bodies gets the upper hand and we can start developing hair patterns like men’s. Than means our head hair can thin, which affects an astounding 40 per cent of women, but also our facial hair can get thicker.

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If you want information on how to look younger over 40, here’s the place to find it

I’ve had Charla Krupp’s book How Not To Look Old on my desk for a few weeks now, awaiting a review. The reason it’s taken me so long to get round to it is that I wanted to be fair.

I wasn’t keen on the title and the fact is that Krupp and I clearly see the world in rather different ways. In her tongue-in-cheek quiz at the start of the book, she happily admits to being high maintenance - that’s mostly A’s. I answered mostly B’s, which makes me medium maintenance, but as I progressed through the book, I started to feel that I was so low maintenance that I was actually off the scale. (And I’m more interested in fashion and beauty than virtually anyone I know.)

Maybe it’s that although I am interested in clothes and fashion and beauty, they’re still only a small part of my life. Asked to choose between spending money on my garden or on my wardrobe, I’d choose the garden without hesitation. Or beads, or music, or books. Krupp, in contrast, is a beauty editor - she’s spent her life evaluating beauty and fashion products, trying one procedure after another, and readily admits to spending about $7,500 a year on beauty maintenance (that’s about two thirds of my income). She also has rather a dictatorial approach to beauty. You MUST, she asserts, make the most of yourself, because otherwise in this dog eat dog world, you’ll be out of a job in no time. With this, I do not agree.

However, let’s not criticise this book for what it is not, and look instead at what it offers. The truth is, if you’re over 40 and looking for tips on how to dress, specific makeup products, foundation primers, brow shaping, shapewear, the best lipsticks, eye shadows and dermatology procedures, this book is jam-packed with information. Krupp has no truck with the idea that more expensive is necessarily better, and many of the products she has approved are from cheap fashion chains and drug stores. This alone makes the book very useful because she has no axe to grind - she’s not a manufacturer trying to plug her own product, nor a make-up artist unwilling to offend a supplier.

She is also refreshingly upfront about her own beauty hangups, her lack of willingness to endure pedicures or paraffin hand treatments, the fact that she didn’t know her own bra size, and that she’s had plastic surgery herself.

The division into low, medium and high maintenance options is a useful rule of thumb, as you can see roughly where you are on the scale (and have a good laugh at the idiots in the other categories…), and there are many nice photographs of women over 40, both famous and unknown, to illustrate Krupp’s points.

Overall, although our attitudes to fashion and beauty may differ (and I dislike the peppy cheerleader approach), she and I are pretty much on track in terms of advice: having a smaller wardrobe of clothes that you wear all the time; only wearing brown eyeshadow; lightening your hair colour and lessening your makeup. Other advice, such as what to wear after Labour Day means nothing to a European, and some I think is plain wrong, such as not wearing nude-colour tights but going bare-legged instead. (Not that I wear tights at all, but for many women, this is just not an option.)

The chapter on jeans is very useful - personally, I had never thought about pocket size - but many of the names mentioned mean nothing to me (I wear Boden, Next and La Redoute). And I still wear dark velvet scrunchies to tie my hair back - so if that’s out of fashion, then tough tits: I’m not about to split my hair follicles with elastic bands.

We seriously parted company in chapter eight, about dermatology, because I am dead against procedures such as Botox and Restylane-type fillers, the very idea of which fill me with horror (since they don’t stay in your face, where do they GO exactly?). Here’s where I draw my personal line in the sand, along with plastic surgery and Lasik eye surgery. Krupp, in contrast, though not in favour of the full face lift or permanent silicone fillers, is a fan of procedures I would rate as beyond the pale. But if you’re thinking of having a procedure and want to rate it, you will find here a very fair appraisal of costs, dangers, what to expect and recovery times.

Overall, I liked about 90 per cent of this book very much. Where we differ, we differ strongly (I principally believe in diet, exercise and meditation to stay young), but for most of it, we’re in total agreement.

How Not To Look Old is available from:  Amazon.co.uk |  Amazon.com

Chloe Marshall’s weight is causing a furore in the UK

For those who don’t know, the reason is that Ms Marshall is the first plus-size girl to ever get a place in the Miss United Kingdom beauty pageant. That fact has brought out doctors, dieticians, bloggers and journalists in droves to comment on her fat/curves/health/BMI and the rest, and whether she should be a role model for young girls or considered a fat disgrace. Can’t be easy when she’s only 17.

Marshall is 5ft 10 tall, so a standard catwalk height, and weighs 176 pounds (12 stone 8), which gives her a BMI of 25.3 by my calculations. Her measurements are 38, 32, 42 and she’s a UK size 16 (for women of my age, that used to be an 18).

I dunno. I have to admit that, for myself, she does look fat. Maybe it’s the photograph that makes her look so heavy but I would have guessed she weighed far more than this.

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As you get older, you’ll probably find your eyelashes aren’t what they once were - here’s some tips to restore the balance

For a lot of women, a side effect of ageing is that their lashes get thinner and sparser - and their immediate reaction is to switch to a volumising mascara.

This is a mistake. As your lashes get thinner, they also get shorter, and a thickening mascara can give you a very clumpy look, like a teenager who’s just learning. Far better is to switch to a lengthening mascara, with very very fine fibres in it, and apply two or three coats as needed. As with all mascara, open your eye wide and apply the product to the roots, then wiggle the brush up through your lashes. This way you get a natural look, and a strong eyeline. For daytime, stick to brown mascara unless you have jet-black hair, as anything else tends to look too harsh.

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The French Government today passed a bill to make the promotion of anorexia in the media illegal

It’s a been some time in the making. In contrast to countries like the United States, obesity, although on the rise in France, is not a major problem compared with anorexia, which has been an issue here since the 1970s.

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Having read a bunch of beauty books recently, I was thinking about the differences between European women and Americans

When Segolene Royal, the French presidential candidate, was campaigning last year, she had a tooth straightened. There was a furore in the French press. What a very low-rent thing to do, they said. How awfully un-French.

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Alright - she’s over 40, so how could I not write about Carla Bruni, who has taken the UK by storm?

She’s all over the papers in her Dior suit (and also, in other papers, without much on at all - very nice timing). Bruni, wife, as we all know, of the French President Nicolas Sarkozy, has done what no-one thought she would - got the British press to roll over and have their tummies tickled. Their love affair with her is much to the bemusement of the French, who haven’t got much time for Bruni.

The truth is, she looks bloody fabulous on her trip. Poised, elegant, sexy as hell. Any woman who wouldn’t want to look like her is probably nuts. There’s no point in envying women like this any more than there is in envying Stephen Hawking’s intellect. Some people have got it and some people haven’t, and Bruni has got it in spades. That’s why she’s a millionairess.

She’s also fulfilling a media role that’s been left vacant a long time. (more…)

A friend sent me an email recently about lead in lipstick causing health problems

Apparently, this information was all over the web in late 2007. I must say I hadn’t seen it - the idea of lead in lipstick was new to me. So I checked it out. Fortunately, it turned out to be another health scare. This time, it’s been put about by a pressure group run by roughly half the cosmetics industry, who are campaigning against the other half. Lead suspects in the lead scandal are named as companies like Chanel, Shiseido and Lancome - all at the high end of the market.

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A new way to wear concealer that gives you a real lift

A lot of us birds over 40 use concealer to hide under-eye circles, and we normally choose yellow (the idea being that this covers the blue better). However, I’ve just come across a new colour that works - pale salmon pink.

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