The List Gets Shorter
Girls grow up hearing rules about how they're supposed to look, often from women who learned the same lessons years earlier. Magazines add their own advice, sometimes conveniently attached to a product. By their thirties, many women have spent enough time following these rules to recognize which ones actually make a difference and which only make getting ready harder. Some advice still holds up, but plenty doesn't. Here are 20 appearance rules women often stop following after 35.
1. Matching Underwear Just In Case
Every date meant the lace set, on the off chance the evening went somewhere. Most evenings ended with a ride home and something that had itched all night. Cotton covers the likely outcomes.
2. Dyeing Every Gray Hair
Roots start showing within weeks of a dye job, so covering gray means a standing appointment or a box from the drugstore for as long as you keep it up. Letting it grow out takes an awkward stretch involving headbands. After that you've got one less appointment for the rest of your life.
3. A Full Face For The Office
Somewhere along the way foundation and contour became part of a dress code that nobody ever wrote down. Showing up to the Monday meeting with mascara and nothing else gets exactly the same work done. Your inbox can't tell the difference.
4. Holding Your Stomach In
The stomach gets pulled in walking into a party and stays that way until the car ride home. Breathing shallowly for an entire evening is a strange price for a slightly flatter outline. A stomach that's carried kids, or just lived thirty-five years, is allowed to relax.
5. Removing Every Body Hair
Daily shaving and a standing wax appointment add up to a lot of time spent on hair nobody sees for most of the year. Keep the routine for summer and the beach. The rest of the year can do what it wants.
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6. Smiling On Demand
Strangers and coworkers tell women to smile, as if a neutral face were an insult aimed at them. Keeping a pleasant expression switched on all day is tiring work. After enough years of it, a resting face stops being anybody else's problem.
7. Wearing A Bra Every Day
Red marks from an underwire at the end of the day used to count as normal. Then everyone worked from home for a while and found out how many days don't require a bra at all. The coffee run is now one of them.
8. Covering Your Upper Arms
Magazine advice put an age limit on sleeveless tops, as if arms became indecent at a particular birthday. A tank top in July is cooler than a cardigan, and that settles it.
9. Making It Look Effortless
The no-makeup makeup look takes a full kit and real time to produce a face that's supposed to look like nothing happened. The rule asks for the effort and then asks you to hide it. Wear the makeup openly or skip it, and either way the double job goes away.
10. Taming Your Natural Texture
Flat-ironing curls or blasting waves straight every morning eats real time and fries the ends. Wearing your natural texture to work and to a wedding saves both. Frizz on a humid day is just weather.
11. Covering Up At The Beach
The skirted one-piece and the cover-up worn knee-deep into the water exist mainly to hide stretch marks. Nobody else on the beach is looking. A bikini with a C-section scar showing is an ordinary sight at any public pool.
12. Filtering Every Photo
Face-smoothing filters erase pores and lines before a picture ever gets posted, and the version of you online drifts away from the one in the mirror. Posting an unedited shot closes the gap. The comments don't get any meaner.
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13. Wearing Heels To Look Serious
Somebody decided heels were the professional shoe, the one that made people take a woman seriously in a meeting. Loafers do the same job, and the walk from the parking garage stops being an event. Feet that spent a decade in pointed toes usually settle the question.
14. Laughing Less To Avoid Lines
Some anti-aging advice goes as far as limiting expressions so lines don't form. That means laughing less, which is a strange trade to make on behalf of your forehead. Most people never notice laugh lines on a friend.
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15. Shapewear Under Everything
Shapewear under a fitted dress at a wedding is one thing. Shapewear under jeans on a Saturday is a whole day spent being squeezed. One good piece for formal events covers it.
16. Wearing Contacts Instead Of Glasses
Contacts got sold as the way to stop glasses from hiding your face. After enough years of dry eyes by mid-afternoon and fishing a lens off the bathroom floor, a good pair of frames starts to look like the better accessory. They also mean never touching your eyeball before coffee.
17. Cutting Your Hair Short At A Certain Age
Long hair is supposed to stop being appropriate somewhere around 40, with a sensible bob arriving alongside the reading glasses. Plenty of women wear it long into their sixties and nobody objects. The right length is whatever you're willing to wash.
18. Dressing For A Partner's Taste
A lot of style advice assumes the audience is a man, and some women spend years building a wardrobe around what a boyfriend or husband liked. Skirts stay in rotation because he preferred them. Eventually the closet gets organized around the person wearing it.
19. Buying Clothes In A Future Size
Jeans bought for the body you're planning to have sit folded in a drawer. Meanwhile you rotate through the few things that fit. Buying for the body you have is the version that gets worn.
20. Trying To Pass For Younger
The standard compliment is that you don't look your age, which turns every birthday into something to get away with. Saying the number out loud with no joke attached ends the game.
