Guiliano - French women dont get facelifts: the secret of aging with style & attitude

Personne nest jeune aprs quarante ans mais on peut tre irrsistible tout ge.

No one is young after forty, but one can be irresistible at any age.

Coco Chanel (18831971)

Last summer, my boyfriend in Provencehe is a handsome, dynamic, whirlwind of a three-and-a-half-year-old gamin, half French, half Indiansaid to me, Youre old. Yes, I am, I said. What else could I say? Of course, to a child someone forty is old. His father was shocked and apologized, but having reached my sixties, Ive looked in the mirror. I now buy senior citizen tickets on Frances TGV train. But I still travel fast.

The thing is, though, inside my head I dont feel old. I dont really think about age, though I feel it sometimesand see it. In my mind, I am sort of ageless or at least the age in which I place myself in memorys pictures. Indeed, looking at old photos, I am a time traveler, fooling time and living inside those photos in the present tense.

Traveling on the TGV, though, I realize that I am as happy as Ive ever been. And thats a surprise. People dread getting old or feeling old, but old today is ninety, not sixty or even seventy. But again, I am not alone in discovering that there are a lot of positives about aging. Here I am like the French women of my birth. As a class we are the happiest between sixty-five and seventy. Go figure. Works for me. Experts explain that it has to do with our maturity, which helps us make the choices that are good for us or satisfy us with what we have, whether we are women or men. Certainly at that age we are far less about becoming than being. We are not aspiring for a different professional position or career, our social set is well established, and we have come to accept our likes and limitations. And we dont have to deal with periods and PMS.

In America, I live in a youth-obsessed culture and a results-oriented culture. So old age is often cast in a negative light. Were less proficient at multitasking and dont look as good doing it. Is that a negative? I have a ninety-four-year-old friend who sometimes says to me, Getting old stinks. Ah, but some people say that about being a teenager. I am always motivated by the very old to think about what I can do now to be better prepared to enjoy the next stages of my life. Economists to sociologists to psychologists try to determine the factors of being satisfaits, a milder form of happy the French prefer to show. I was surprised to learn that studies reveal we are the least happy between twenty and fifty, with possibly those forty-five to fifty hitting the least happy period and then increasing our satisfaits into our seventies. So be sure to celebrate your fiftieth birthday. It marks a new beginning to happiness.

When I was in my thirties and forties, I did not think about getting or being old. I mostly lived in the present, being busy and trying to live life to the fullest. I did, however, pay attention to living a healthy lifestyle. And in my four books on the subject, three with an emphasis on developing a good relationship with food and with yourself, I shared some of the lessons I had learned along the way. But they are only a part of the art and joie de vivre.

I have the genes to live a great many years, and I want to know how to attack aging so to enjoy it to the fullest. And I know I am not alone. My friend never dreamed she would live to age ninety-four and never prepared for the later stages in life the way I will. I am not thinking so much about living long, but rather about looking good and feeling healthy in the decades ahead.

Our world is graying: Europe is aging, America is aging, China and other nations are aging. I am a baby boomer, and a reality is that every day more than seven thousand Americans turn sixty-five. By 2030, 18 percent of Americans will be senior citizens, up from 12 percent today. That trend is true for the majority of nations. By 2025, one-third of all Japanese will be sixty-five or older.

Because of the reception of my lifestyle books and perhaps because I was born French, I am often asked to share my tips on aging gracefully, an expression I dont like. Aging with attitude is what I believe in.

As someone with a foot in two countries, my native France and adopted America, as well as continuing stops all over the globe, I can sometimes see the advantages (and follies) of each culture sharply and share what seems to work welland not so wellwith other women. Take facelifts and other cosmetic surgery.

Cosmetic surgery all over the world is becoming almost a religion, and many people worship at the doctors office till they are stretched like a too-tight blouse and bear frozen smiles. France, a country devoted to female beauty and where women of a certain age are models of desire, elegance, and seductiveness, is not a land of facelifts, like South Korea or America, for instance. French women seek a more natural look and feel, opting for creams and scrubs and, okay, perhaps a few partake in a little Botox or another filler, and look to what they eat and wear before the surgeons scalpel. And when they seek a little medical magic, it tends to be liposuction.