My thoughts on beauty and my own skin care regimen (it's not grand, I'll tell you!)

(Happy Saturday, everyone. This is going up a few hours early.)

In the comments the other day, I was asked to share my skin care regimen. Which is really weird, because my regimen is quite minimal. But I thought I'd share my personal thoughts on beauty, aging and skin.

We live in a warped society, where a 20 year-old woman is thought to be beautiful if she looks like a 12 year-old girl. Women have horrible things done to themselves in the name of beauty. They have their faces injected, cut, lifted, chemically abraded -- all in the name of beauty. Real beauty comes from the spirit of a woman, not the skin that she's wrapped in.

The kind of beauty I pursue, is the beauty of a young mother who snuggles her newborn baby right after his first breath. This same beauty is that of a daughter, tear rolling down her cheek, as she holds her dying father's hand when he takes his last breath. This is love. This is joy. This is sorrow. This is life. This is beauty.

I want to have laugh lines, worry lines and tear-stained cheeks. I want my face to say that I've lived a rich and love-filled life. I want children to know that I'm a pleasant old lady, who enjoys the company of their young selves.


My memories of a very beautiful older lady (and she was indeed a lady)

Her name was Mrs. Reaume. And she was my piano teacher. She had lived through joy and sorrow. She was kind. She was patient. She was gentle. And she was 75 years old.

Her lovely white hair was loosely pinned into a bun on the back of her head. She wore elegant dresses with billowy sleeves, often in the same shade of ice blue as her sparkling eyes.

She was a widow. But somewhere along the line she picked up a suitor, Mr. Earl. She called him her gentleman friend. But my sister and I giggled in secret about Mr. Earl being Mrs. Reaume's boyfriend. Mr. Earl would drive Mrs. Reaume's enormous Cadillac convertible each week, ferrying Mrs. Reaume to her lessons with half-pint pupils. Mr. Earl knew that Mrs. Reaume was a beauty.

Mrs. Reaume's face gently held it's share of wrinkles. But there was beauty in these wrinkles, evidence of a life well-lived. That's the kind of beauty that I pursue.

So, I too will have a face filled with wrinkles, Lord willing that I should live a long life. I really don't fight them. My beauty regime is much simpler than that of many American women, but maybe similar to yours.

What I don't do

• I don't exfoliate
• I don't use a toner
• I don't use soap on my face
• I don't do injections of any kind (ouchy, ouch, ouch!)
• And I don't have a cabinet of products that I use every day

In fact, I have 1 product for daily use. It's a moisturizing lotion that I use as my cleanser, moisturizer and eye"cream".

I have extremely sensitive skin, prone to eczema. My face can not tolerate many products. Exfoliation would be painful, A toner would chap my skin. Soap burns. I have tried many products which claim to be good for eczema. But so far, I've just found one moisturizer (and I use it as an all-purpose product) which actually helps the feel and condition of my skin. It's called CeraVe Moisturizing Lotion. You buy it in the drugstore.

About 5 years ago, I read a book on dealing with eczema. The doctor recommended a different lotion, which I could not find locally. But the key ingredients were ceramides. If you'd like to read up a bit on ceramides here's a link to more info. It appears that ceramides are indeed helpful for eczematic skin (I found that out personally about 5 years ago). If you suffer from eczema, I'd recommend asking your doctor about products with ceramides. Many dermatologists are recommending CeraVe, as it's affordable and over the counter. And that's my big skin care secret! LOL!

I also use cortisone cream during allergy season. I keep a tube of it with me in my purse.


I told you that I use this one single product for cleansing and moisturizing. I tried the cleanser in this line, but found I got better results just using this one product, the moisturizer. So here's my grand skin care regimen.

• I apply CeraVe to my face, then splash off with warm water. 
• I pat my face dry, then immediately put more CeraVe on my face. If I've been out in the wind, I wait for the first coat of CeraVe to soak in, then apply just a bit more. 
• I dab more CeraVe under my eyes, as an eye "cream". Because of it's water content, I have to wait a minute or two before putting on concealer over my dark circles. 
• I do the cleansing/moisturizing thing at least once per day, twice if I've been active, worn make-up, or allergies are causing itchies.

I also had a conversation with a dermatologist (who had great skin, by the way, for a woman in her 60s, obviously followed her own advice) several years ago. She told me great skin is mostly genetic, but there were a few things I could do to influence my own outcome.

Avoid:

• alcohol
• tobacco
• caffeine
• soda pop
• stress
• sun exposure between 10 AM and 3 PM

She said "do":

• use sunscreen 
• wear sunglasses
• wear a hat when outdoors
• eat fish, nuts, avocados and olive oil

Basic stuff that we've all heard, but I do think this common sense approach can benefit both our insides and our outsides.

How have I done over the years with this? Well, I'm great on the tobacco and alcohol. And I gave up soda about 18 years ago.

I'm not always great about avoiding the sun, but I do wear a hat. I live in Seattle -- so I can never find my sunglasses, and that's a problem.

I'm terrible on the stress and eating fish. I really dislike fish, but I am trying very hard to include it. And I can't seem to give up coffee. I'm down to half-caff coffee. I'm trying to get down to 1/4 caffeinated coffee. (Any tips on cutting out coffee would be greatly appreciated. I do okay for a while, then I slip back into drinking a lot of it again.)

And the stress, well, what can I say. Stress is one of the worst things you can do for the outside and inside of your body. Stress causes our bodies to produce cortisol. Cortisol reduces the skin's collagen. Collagen is what gives your skin it's elasticity. Elasticity is what makes our skin look tight and plump. If you pinch the back of your hand, the pinch mark should go away almost immediately in young, pre-menopausal skin. But if your body has been making a lot of cortisol for a while, that elasticity will be diminished. That's a sign that you're aging both on the inside and the outside. I am working on the stress issue, finding better ways to de-stress and taking supplements which help with stress.

I expect my skin will "age" considerably in the next 5 years or so. I haven't gone through menopause yet, but someday will. It's a part of life.

I'm much more concerned, though, with how my insides will age. If someday, I'm old and wrinkly, well at least I'm old, is my attitude. I hope to become a sweet, little old lady, sporting plenty of laugh and worry lines.

How about you? What's your beauty secret?

Produce triage: preventing produce waste

Triage is a rather important sounding word for what I do with our produce. But it fits.

I first heard of the word triage when watching M*A*S*H in the 70s. The word triage comes from the verb (Fr) trier, which means to separate or select. It's been mostly used in medical settings, as in the TV show M*A*S*H.  But I am hearing it used more and more outside of the medical field, such as "to triage an issue".

Basically triage means to give priority to what needs and could most benefit from urgent attention.



If you are on a tight budget, buying produce by the bag can save you a substantial percentage of your grocery budget. But buying bagged produce sounds like a recipe for waste disaster for many of us. Have you ever bought a bag of fruit or vegetables, and had half the bag rot, unbeknownst to you? This has happened in my kitchen.

It's not like I am carelessly picking up the first bag of oranges I see at the market. I actually search the bag, through the plastic, to see if the produce is good all through. But still, there can be that lone orange or onion that has gone soft, and will soon rot, contaminating the entire bag. (And it's the one usually hiding behind the label, hmmm.)

Several years ago, tired of this happening, I decided to make a change in my at-home treatment of produce. I now "triage" all my bagged produce as I bring it into the house.

I go through each bag, and pull out any pieces of produce that look like they could "go" at any moment. I place these in a spot in my kitchen fridge that means, "use this first". The good pieces either get loaded into drawers in the garage fridge (like onions, apples and oranges), or tucked into a paper grocery sack (like potatoes) to store in the pantry.

Just this week, I bought a large sack of onions, and found this one, near the bottom. It was usable. I just had to cut off about a 1-inch by 2-inch chunk. If I had not triaged this bag of onions, this onion would have rotted and caused the rot of several more onions.

I also bought a bag of oranges. In this bag I found several squishy ones. They are still edible, but will be the first to "go" in about a week. So, these have been designated to be used up within a few days.

Here's 10 lbs. of potatoes. They were in a plastic bag. Sometimes the potatoes have sat in a damp warehouse in storage. Moisture covers the potatoes inside the bag and mold forms on the skins. The plastic bags do have some ventilation holes, but even so, my potatoes feel slightly damp on the skins. By transferring to a paper sack, not only does the moisture dissipate, but I can keep these potatoes in darkness better (and longer) in the paper, preventing some of the green that develops on and just below the skin. And yes, not only were these potatoes a bit damp, but I found one potato with a large bruise. I cut off that bruise and cooked the potato the next day.

It may sound like a lot of work, to go through the bags once I'm home, but it's really not. It only takes a few minutes per bag. And I usually only buy a couple of bags of produce at a time. I view it as just another part of putting the groceries away.



I also triage containers of berries right away. I search the sides of the berry clamshell in the store, and think all is well, only to find several moldy berries at the bottom in a few days. So, I gently empty the plastic clamshell onto a dish towel, sort through, set aside those that should be consumed that day, or frozen for smoothies or cobblers later. I add a paper towel or napkin to the bottom of the container, then refill with the berries. A container of berries will keep several days longer, with this extra bit of attention, than when I don't triage them.

I do occasionally buy bagged leafy greens, and I have a way to deal with them, as well. Before I put them in the fridge, I open the bag and dump them into the salad spinner. I pull out any leaves that look like they could get yucky right away, and use or freeze that day. The rest I leave in the spinner, and I add about a spoonful of water to the bottom of the spinner (beneath the basket), and keep in the fridge. I had a bag of spinach keep for 8 days this way once (then we'd eaten it all, no telling just how long it could have kept). As I needed spinach I would pick through the leaves in the spinner and find those which should be used first. The aging leaves were pulled out earliest, plus nothing sat up against the inside of a plastic bag, and I think that's what kept the spinach so fresh, for so long.

I don't seem to have a problem with bagged carrots or celery, so I don't do anything out of the ordinary with either of them.

How about you? What's your best tip for preventing produce waste?