When I started blogging a little over a year ago, it was a personal thing.  First and foremost, my husband told me I needed a hobby because I was way too engrossed in work and spent way too much of my own time dealing with it.  I had very little work-life balance.  His hope was that if I started focusing on something I enjoyed doing at home, it wouldn't be so easy for me to be on my Blackberry, laptop, phone, etc. constantly.  Prior to blogging, my biggest hobby at home was cooking, eating and drinking, hence reason number two for deciding to blog.  All that cooking, eating and drinking had led to some body changes that I was not very comfortable with.  When we started to take pictures, I quickly came to the realization that my body looked very different from how I thought it did.  This led to me exploring new styles, shapes and colors I probably would not have chosen before.  I discovered how easy it was to fall into the "I'm over 40, I don't like my body, so I'll wear a sheet" phase of life.  The last year has helped me discover new ways of dressing and to also get back to better eating choices and acknowledging that exercise has to be part of life.

Now that I think I've fully embraced that light bulb moment, I'm moving on to the next, and for me, the far more unnerving part.  I have fine lines, wrinkles and facial sagging.  Since there is not a face lift in sight for me (due to the fact that I live in Southern California where we supposedly have the best plastic surgeons in the country, but I've never seen a woman who looks natural after a face lift), I have to embrace what I have.  I've decided to do more blogs about beauty because let's face it, we use different products than those lovely young things, and if we do use the same color products, we may have to apply them differently.  So here, up close and personal is me.  I go back and forth between mineral powder and liquid foundation, and I'm currently using mineral powder.  Am I the only person in the world who feels like I stop getting the results I want from something after a while, so I need to make a change?  I have only found one product I consistently return to time and again because of that, and that product is Rosebud Salve which is the only thing that keeps my lips conditioned.  I have a love/hate relationship with blush because of suffering from rosacea.  It's really hard to find a shade that adds the right kind of color.  I turned to nude lips several years ago.  I've always felt that I needed a lot of color on my eyes and to balance that out, I like a softer lip.  I will say that I'm starting to question if a dark eye is appropriate now, so I've switched to something lighter.  I'm not sold on it yet, but we'll see.  I'm currently a week late on my hair coloring.  I don't go in until Saturday, so there will be no parts in my life for the rest of the week.  I'm also way overdue on my brow wax, so if you simply have to express your opinions on that, please know that you can't be any more critical of them than I already am.  I cannot do my brows by myself to save my life; therefore, there will continue to be two angry caterpillars on my brow for a few more days.  Let's hope they don't decide to meet in the middle.

I'm choosing to give you the good, the bad and the ugly about the products I choose, and in life (as my family and my employees will be sure to tell you), I tend to have no problem saying when I don't like something.  I hope to have a good balance here on the blog with goods vs bads.

Today I'm wearing Estee Lauder's Pure Color Sequin Finish Lip Gloss.  I've been an Estee Lauder devotee for years.  It was the first department store line I started using when I began working and wanted to have grown up lady makeup.  All of the colors in this line are infused with subtle sparkle from glitter.  I thought that this would be a great place to start because how age inappropriate is glitter?  The Molten Honey shade is actually a lovely nude with gold flecks.  I'm wearing it here in two layers over the ubiquitous Rosebud Salve.  I really quite like the effect.  The product has an amazingly soft texture out of the container; it felt soothing and rich going on.  Like most gloss, it had to be reapplied in about an hour, but since I find those products that have the sealant in them way too drying, I'll deal with reapplying.  I highly recommend the Sequin Finish and found it entirely age appropriate and a great way to get some sparkle in my life.

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