Makeup Tips That Unleash Your Real Cougar

by Linda Franklin

Your makeup has to change as your face does.  We should not be using the same products and techniques at 50 that we did at 25.  Our skin has changed, so our beauty regime has to be revised too.

We’ve all seen the Baby Jane ladies who refuse to change with the times – don’t be one of them.  Here are some tips that will allow you to show off your best features and camouflage what you don’t want to see. 

Stay Away From Dark Lipstick – As we age, our lips thin. Super dark lipstick on skinny lips isn’t attractive. Your best lipstick bet is the shade closest to your natural lip color or if you like color, rosy reds. Orange lipsticks are aging, but pinks are not. Instead of playing up your lips, concentrate on your eyes as your feature attraction.

A bit of lip gloss makes lips appear plumper. Dab a bit on cheeks to create a dewy glow.

More lipstick tips in How to Apply Lipstick: 16 Lipstick Tips & Tricks.

Eye Pencils Instead of Liquid Liners - Eye pencils are softer than liquid liners, which can be harsh on aging eyes. To soften the line even more, smudge it with your fingers. And don’t line the inside of the eye if you have small eyes, it makes the eye appear smaller.

Find out more in How to Apply Eyeliner.

The Right Eyeshadows -  You should make your eyes the focal point of your face. This will detract attention from any fine lines or turkey wattles.

Enhance your eye color with eyeshadow shades that will make your eyes pop. For brown or hazel eyes, golds and browns are gorgeous. Blue eyes look great with blue-gray and lighter browns and dark eyes look fantastic with dark shades.

Find out more in Eyeshadow: How to Apply It, My Best Picks & More.

Less is More -  You don’t want to pile on the foundation, the eyeliner and the heavy lipstick. Instead, you want to use highlighter pens, tinted moisturizers and a lighter touch with the shadow and lipstick. Oh, and you might want to get some bangs.

More makeup tips in How to Conceal Wrinkles on Your Face.

Concealing Sagging Skin - As we age, we may begin to notice a big change taking place under the chin. And I’m not talking about excessive growth of chin hairs. You may develop a turkey wattle or you might what you consider a double chin. Either way, you might want to conceal it.

You could see a plastic surgeon and have lipo under your chin or a facelift, but if you don’t want to spend the cash or endure surgery, there are inexpensive ways to conceal sagging skin and a crepe-y neck.

Check out these tips and many more in Loose Skin? 4 Tips to Conceal Sagging Skin.

How to Conceal Droopy Eyelids Without Surgery - Drooping eyelids are another natural part of the aging process but there’s no need to invest in eyelid surgery. You can spend thousands on an eyelift or you can try these beauty tips that cost nothing. Find out how in How to Conceal Droopy Eyelids Without Surgery.

Thinning or Bushy Eyebrows -  Keeping your brows done nicely is like having a facelift without surgery, according to author Charla Krupp’s brow guy. Here are some tips for perfect brows:

• Get your brows professionally done. Nothing opens eyes up like curled lashes and neat brows. If you can’t afford waxing or threading every few weeks, use the professional’s job as a map for your own tweezing. Simply pluck the stray hairs that grow in between professional tweezing or waxing. How to pluck your own brows.
• Drawn-in brows are a no-no. You know the pencil-thin line you see some of your friends or women in your town wear? Well, they only age you and they’re somewhat tacky. Learn how to properly fill in sparse brows.
• Avoid tweezing gray brow hairs. Instead, conceal them with a brow powder or pencil.

Thinning Lips - As we age, our lips lose some of their fat. Here’s how to plump up thin lips.

• Picking the right lip color is a must. Makeup artist Bobbi Brown suggests skipping the bright colors and opt for a color that’s just a shade or 2 darker than your natural lip color. Check out 16 Lipstick Tricks and Tips.
• As you age, your natural lip line fades. Create a lip line by coloring in lips first with a lip liner, then apply gloss or lipstick over the liner.
• Consider getting rid of lipstick and using lip gloss instead. Gloss creates the illusion of puffed-up lips, especially when applied to the middle of lips.
• Lip plumpers do work, but the effects don’t last long (we’re talking under an hour). So skip the plumpers and save your money. Even Vaseline on lips will make them appear larger.
• Check out Cynthia Rowland’s Luscious Lips.

Let me know if you have any great tips to share with out fabulous females.

The Real Cougar Woman is a 5-carat diamond who knows the importance of taking care of her health, beauty, relationships, finances and spirituality. Linda Franklin says,” there is no stopping a woman who has a strong belief system and a dream.  All things are possible”.  Linda’s book, Don’t Ever Call Me Ma’am helps women of all ages tap into their power and live life to the fullest.

Lift Your Face, Lift Your Spirits

By Cynthia Rowland

When you look in the mirror, does the memory of your 27 year old face make you wish you could look could turn back the clock  five, ten, even fifteen years?

Well, now you can!

My passion is teaching facial exercise to every person who allows me to touch their face and here’s what  I have discovered:  when a person performs the upper eye exercise, their eyes open and tension melts away.  Visible lifting and toning  makes everyone smile.  When you lift your face, you lift your spirits.

Aging in the face is a result of sun damage, environmental challenges, hormones and sagging facial muscles.

Muscles lose their oomph and their strength when gravity and disuse cause the muscle and muscle groups to elongate. These descending muscles can elongate up to ½ inch and when the muscles pool into each other, the skin begins to sag and wrinkle as it copes with the heavy muscles that are headed south.  Mother Nature is tromping across your face creating her recipe for an aging face.

Beauty Guru, Jackie Silver, Agingbackwards.com, has long touted exercise as the fountain of youth. Tucson physician Jennifer P. Schneider, M.D., Ph.D., author of Living with Chronic Pain, says, “any kind of exercise has psychological and physical benefits that reduce anxiety and lift your spirits.”

Just like exercise works for your body, isometric exercise movements using anchoring techniques that produce meaningful contractions will change the shape and contour of your face. As your tiny muscles respond to the easy to perform movements, most users feel and see the lifting immediately and when those movements are repeated daily, the new you develops. From the inside out, muscles reposition, the skin feels and acts younger and lifting is apparent.

Do you have crows’ feet?  Do you see lines around your eyes when you smile? Crows’ feet are caused when your forehead muscle lengthens (it’s a vertical muscle that run across your forehead) and collides with the round eye muscle. The heavy forehead begins to affect the compression around your eyes.

Try this:  Lift the areas at your temples with your fingertips first up and back into the hairline. Look in the mirror; do you see how the crows’ feet are lessened? Do you see lined or hooded eyelids? Both conditions are caused by drooping eyebrows and exercise can strengthen the underlying muscles.

Many people have reported that facial exercise has replaced injections that plump and paralyze the wayward muscles and rather than cutting perfectly healthy skin, exercise has been successfully used to help most users look 10 – 15 years younger. Imagine no injections, no invasive procedures, no huge outlay of cash, no doctors, no drugs and no risk at all to your beautiful face. Your power suit, your calling card will remain intact. “You will simply look better than you have in years – I haven’t used injections at all in the past three years because I regularly exercise my face,” says Jackie Silver. “It only takes a few minutes to go through the routine and my face looks like a teenager’s. I am a believer!”

Sagging eyelids and cheeks? Pouches, Jowls, or a Double Chin? There’s an exercise for that!

Every area of your face and neck will be exercised using specialized movements. Your facial features will experience lifting, toning and tightening.

You will be thrilled with your results. So this holiday season lift your face lift your spirits!

The Real Cougar Woman is a 5-carat diamond who knows the importance of taking care of her health, beauty, relationships, finances and spirituality. Linda Franklin says,”there is no stopping a woman who has a strong belief system, passion and a dream. All things are possible”. Linda’s book, Don’t Ever Call Me Ma’am helps women of all ages tap into their power and live life to the fullest.

Plastic Surgery Disaster – The Before Better Than The After

By Cynthia Rowland 

What if you make the decision to have plastic surgery and the before looks better than the after?  That happens more times than you can imagine and it happened to Laura. Here’s what she said – “I wasn’t going to leave a suicide note. People would know why I’d killed myself. One look at my face said it all — I’d made myself look ­hideously ugly. My face was lopsided, my nose was too skinny, my lips were ­distorted and my chin was crooked”.

Laura is typical of many patients who are left profoundly depressed by their appearance ­after undergoing facial plastic surgery. 

Underlying psychological disorders may trigger the desire for change but doctors are hard pressed to know if  every man or woman who makes an appointment for a surgical procedure is ready to accept the results.

Disappointing results plague over 30% of facial plastic surgery patients and that may be the upshot of unrealistic expectations. If you elect to have a streamlined nose, enhanced bosom or a face lift, the end result just might be too much when you see your new self.

There is any easier way to go where you can lift and tone your face without surgery.  Facial exercise is a non-surgical alternative that has shown remarkable results throughout the years by millions of satisfied faces.

Lifting sagging facial features without incisions and sutures not only saves your facial features from possible disfigurement – we’ve all seen the over-inflated cheeks, the squinty eyes, the wind tunnel face – on celebrities and even our friends. Facial exercise will keep you looking like you – only younger.

Considering the current trend of men and women wanting natural results – the results of lifting and toning using facial exercise begins Day One. Just like exercise works wonders for slack and atrophied bodies, the very same principals are applied when using facial exercise to tighten sagging facial features. Resistance, contraction and isometric movements shape and contour droopy cheeks, hooded eyes, double chins and more. Those sagging and droopy facial features make you look older because the underlying muscles have lost their oomph. Once you begin contracting the muscles oxygenated blood is forced into the facial tissue so that skin and muscles reposition and this helps you look younger.

Back to Laura: Laura Pillarella, 41, wanted to “fix herself” and chose plastic surgery. Now after 15 unsatisfactory procedures she has written a book charting her excessive amounts of procedures, titled Chasing Beauty: My Cosmetic ­Surgery Takeover. Laura is not alone – there are others who have experienced great anguish when seeing their after surgery results. Patients frequently schedule revision surgeries only to feel less confident in their appearance after the second or third or tenth procedure. Are the doctors to blame for this dissatisfaction or the patient who cannot accept their God-given beauty?

Yes, some people are afflicted with Body Dysmorphic Disorder and most likely they will suffer the silent epidemic of disappointment no matter how many procedures they undergo. But anyone can change their thinking about their options and about the modalities they choose.

Using facial exercise is empowering. Your confidence will soar as you realize the control is in your hands. Turn back the hands of time naturally, self assured and positive that you can look 5, 10 even 15 years younger in just weeks.

The Real Cougar Woman is a 5-carat diamond who knows the importance of taking care of her health, beauty, relationships, finances and spirituality. Linda Franklin says,”there is no stopping a woman who has a strong belief system, passion and a dream. All things are possible”. Linda’s book, Don’t Ever Call Me Ma’am helps women of all ages tap into their power and live life to the fullest.

Disguising The Effects Of Aging

by Cynthia Rowland CynthiaRowland.com

Once a face is injected with chemical substances it is forever changed. It's the same with lopping off sagging skin; no matter how experienced the surgeon is the once untouched face will forever display signs of alteration. Even laser treatments have proven to be iffy at best, with unexpected burns and holes in the chin and around the eyes when over aggressive actions are used.

Disguising aging is big business these days; not only are the docs vying for your dollars, the department stores, spas, drugstores and internet sites want you to buy their hyped anti-aging lotions, potions and serums.

We have been deluged with all sorts of anti-aging concoctions from the foreskin of baby penises, to a specially bred fish that are willing to eat away at dead skin. EW!  Do these preparations deliver on their promises or are they just clever ads to have us spend our hard-earned dollars?

Anti-Aging Procedures Could Speed Up Aging

How many injections, surgeries, lipo-suctions and treatments can your body handle without rebelling? New reports suggest that aggressive and invasive anti-aging procedures actually can speed-up aging.  So be advised that prolonged use of injections and other treatments may not give you what you’re  looking for. 

Aging happens.  If you don’t see evidence that your face, breasts, arms and hips are starting to slide south by age 35, you are very fortunate that your  parents and grandparents gifted you with youthful genes.

Temporary, paralyzing and plumping, toxin-laden injections cost a lot of money and produce a weird, freakish, unnatural contour to faces.  And, they do absolutely nothing to promote good health or make a face look younger.

The truth is hard to hear: using man-made substances that claim to prop up sagging skin will not last.

Oh sure, you will initially see a difference but the reality is this: injections, like surgeries, must be consistently repeated and refreshed ala Joan Rivers. Now Joanie has pretty deep pockets and can easily afford to keep her plastic surgeon driving a Maserati in Marbella; but, can you?

Consider celebrities who readily invest money in the best of everything – homes, vacations, travel, and luxury de jour – have by choice chosen plastic surgery, injections and loads of treatment just hoping to further enhance their appearance, career, and bankability. Without naming names, we have seen results that surely weren’t anticipated.

Oversized lips, ghastly raised eyebrows, inflated cheeks, splayed mouths, flat cheeks, the wind-tunnel, surprised look coupled with harsh laser treatments that guarantee any face could easily resemble the Bride of Frankenstein are frequently seen in the hottest spots like the Ivy and Nobu, in gossip magazines and celebrity blogs. If celebrities who can afford the finest of everything end up with freakish looking faces, what will you get?

There is good news here.  You can easily recession-proof your face and look younger than your years if you are willing to try an all-natural alternative like facial exercise.

Exercise changes everything. Just as torsos, arms, legs, hips, buttocks and thighs slim and tighten with regular exercise; facial exercise can tighten and lift the sagging facial features that make a face look tired and old.

Rather than spending several thousand dollars on temporary fixes invest in a facial exercise program to manage your sagging cheeks and eyebrows, double chins, lined foreheads and more.

Don’t be fooled thinking all facial exercise programs are the same. Facial exercise that employs resistance and isometric movements go far beyond contortions, twitches and scrunches to insure that your face will lift, tighten and contour.

Facial exercise requires only minutes a day to complete a routine. Your thumbs and fingers clothed in white cotton gloves accurately target those small sagging underlying muscles. Those muscles will feel alive again in just seconds as oxygenated blood that distributes nutrients to our cells courses through the tissues.

Not only will facial exercise restore the muscle tone in your face and neck, your confidence will soar. Imagine, a younger looking face without the danger, risk or unpredictability of injections, drugs or surgery. Learn more about Facial Magic at www.cynthiarowland.com

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The Real Cougar Woman is a 5-carat diamond who knows the importance of taking care of her health, beauty, relationships, finances and spirituality.  Linda Franklin says,”there is no stopping a woman who has a strong belief system, passion and a dream. All things are possible”. Linda’s book, Don’t Ever Call Me Ma’am helps women of all ages tap into their power and live life to the fullest.

Sagging Faces Are #1 Concern After Weight Loss

When Jan was leaving college she vowed to lose the extra sixty pounds she had put on.  It took a few years to get the hang of smaller portions, her weight yo-yoed up and down but finally, she accomplished her weight loss goal.

She was thrilled that the extra weight was gone but when she looked into the mirror her face reminded her of a Shar Pei.  There was loose skin not only on her face but down into her neck as well. At the age of 37 she seriously considered plastic surgery and in fact, had scheduled a face and neck lift the very day I met her.

Cosmetic Surgery Cannot Help Heal A Broken Heart

Divorcees are a cosmetic surgeons wet dream. Vengeance surgery now makes up about 25% of all cosmetic work done.  Women have this misguided idea that going under the knife will exact some type of revenge on their wandering, cheating husbands who have dumped them for a younger model.

Reinventing yourself after a traumatic breakup isn’t a new idea but using surgery to prop up hurt feelings and rejection just might be detrimental to your overall well being.Seeking revenge on that conniving philanderer who allowed you to put your dreams on hold while he fulfilled his, may initially feel comforting and well deserved, but remember this: surgery is dangerous business. 

The stress from a breakup is very real and can really reek havoc on your body and your face.  You know at that moment in time you are particularly vulnerable and a sagging face is a constant reminder that you are aging. So, if you are promised that injections, surgery, laser treatments, and chemical peels will help you recpature your youthful essence it's hard not to resist.  

Plastic Surgery Where The Before Looks Better Than The After

What if you make the decision to have plastic surgery and the before looks better than the after?  That happens more times than you can imagine and it happened to Laura. Here's what she said – "I wasn’t going to leave a suicide note. People would know why I’d killed myself. One look at my face said it all — I’d made myself look ­hideously ugly. My face was lopsided, my nose was too skinny, my lips were ­distorted and my chin was crooked".

Laura is typical of many patients who are left profoundly depressed by their appearance ­after undergoing facial plastic surgery. 

Underlying psychological disorders may trigger the desire for change but doctors are hard pressed to know if  every man or woman who makes an appointment for a surgical procedure is ready to accept the results.

Disappointing results plague over 30% of facial plastic surgery patients and that may be the upshot of unrealistic expectations. If you elect to have a streamlined nose, enhanced bosom or a face lift, the end result just might be too much when you see your new self.

Cougar Woman’s 5 Secrets For A More Youthful Face

We’re sophisticated; we know that lotions and potions will keep our skin smooth and blemish free but can make up, concealers and other cosmetic skin care items make us look years younger?  Well, sort of…

Let's face facts. It’s our drooping facial features that make us look old. Look in the mirror – does your face look and feel firm? If you’re over the age of 40 there is softness and sagging in your features whether you see the tell-tale signs or not.

So what do you do?  Surgery is not exactly a walk in the park and you’ve seen results that may have you scratching your head and asking 'what were they thinking'?  Nobody wants that pulled and unnatural look that screams you've had work done.

Here are my five anti-aging tips that really work to help you look younger now.

1. Lift your brows Sagging, droopy eye lids can impair vision and make you look tired. Use this proven exercise six days in a row:  Place the three middle fingers of each hand underneath your eye brows. Drop the palms of your hands to your face. Push your eye brows straight up and then slightly outwards toward the temple (this stops the “elevens” from forming). Use your forehead muscle and push downward into your fingertips while holding your brows high. Count to five. Release and take a cleansing breath. Get right back into position and hold the next three contractions for a count of ten seconds each. Close your eyes at the 7^th second.

Beauty Poll Reveals 1 in 3 Women Over 40 Wants Plastic Surgery

 
Superdrug, Britain's second-largest beauty and health retailer, polled 3,000 women between the ages of 40 and 60; the results disclosed that one in three women over 40 is thinking about plastic surgery.

The Superdrug survey also revealed that a fifth of the women between 40 and 60 would happily get a face lift if they had the money.  And,almost one third of those polled, said they’d rather look 20 years younger than be a millionaire.

What would you say is the cosmetic procedure most women over 40 want?