I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 Read Online Free PDF Page A

can afford the longer life span that the supplements I can’t afford are supposed to afford me will be to find gainful employment in the afterlife.
    And sure, given all of that, I should not be handing over my credit card, but I am not alone. No, I’m just further statistical confirmation of “The Lipstick Effect.” The worse economic times get, the more women splurge on small luxury items. Which is why, as I reach for the card, I review the list of things I do not and will never have the money for, now that I am a slave to my face.
    I have never owned a second home; I don’t really own my first home, mortgaged as it is. Never flown in a private plane, neverholidayed in Turks and Caicos (had to look up the spelling of Turks and Caicos), and the likelihood that I will travel there is so remote that I’m not even sure where they’re located, though I am aware that they’re a spectacularly tony destination where vacationers’ effluence gets whisked swiftly away but flows untreated into the surrounding waters, causing degradation to endangered coral reefs.
    I’ve never purchased a designer handbag, never hired an interior designer or eaten at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant when I was paying. I also have never lived through a genocide, walked across Africa, or licked newspapers for nutritional value like Frank McCourt, although I was once tempted to lick a positive review in the
New York Times
. I have first-world problems, I know this, but they are still
my
first-world problems. It’s not that I want any one of these extravagances or that I think these things will make me happy, but there’s something about knowing I will probably never have them that’s not unlike how devastatingly sad I felt when I realized the window for having children had closed forever.
    I also kept buying tampons long after the periods ended, eyeing them wistfully in the bathrooms of younger women, until I contrived an actual justification to purchase. I reasoned that I should stock our bathrooms with tampons in case one of my son’s friends needs one. I’m sure I appeared deranged, strolling down the aisle, gleefully plucking the package off the shelf, triumphantly plunking it down at the checkout counter. “No, thanks, I don’t need a bag,” I chirped and sashayed out of the store clutching my totem of membership in the lady community. At home, I carefully opened the package, removing a few so the girlswouldn’t feel self-conscious about taking one. If I spend any more money today, it will threaten my Tampax budget. *
    So as I hand over my credit card and Marte repeats that she really wants to show me that scrub, I am holding the line at the outermost layer of my epidermis. It’s like Vietnam. Must not cross the seventeenth parallel. “No, I’m fine, but do you have any samples of moisturizers?” I say, as the realization sinks in that I have spent over two hundred dollars in less than five minutes. I must not leave without receiving something free, and moisturizers are the Holy Grail of all facial products. The sheer quantity of them on the market is astounding. Promising everything from age-defying renewal to tightening, toning, repairing, rejuvenating and stimulating, the descriptions alone can restore your faith in the value of a liberal arts degree. The dramatically depicted ingredients range from the oceanic (seaweed, algae and fish oil) to the botanical (lavender, jojoba and
maracuja
).
    Many of the products on the market advertise under the moniker “cosmeceuticals,” * a term that conflates cosmetics with pharmaceuticals. Often this refers to “biologically active ingredients,” and despite the fact that the FDA does not recognize any such category, it has a ring of authority, but means nothing in this context. A frog contains biologically active ingredients; so do lima beans. So go figure.
    The saddest unguent on the counter has to be the tub of goop whose label is simple and to the point: Hope in a Jar. I have never