These past few weeks, I’ve been clocking a minimum of an hour a day in the pool, and usually it’s more like two – the first around late afternoon, helping my kids figure out this whole “move your arms and legs at the same time” thing, and the second after they’ve gone to bed, when I have nothing more pressing to do than swim a few laps all by myself in the silence.

I’m trying to remember to do this more lately: find opportunities to be quiet with myself. It doesn’t come naturally at all, but I read something Brené Brown wrote about letting go of the idea that exhaustion is a status symbol, and it’s something I’ve been trying to remind myself of as often as I can. Basically: that it is okay to rest, and to do something for no other reason than because you enjoy it.

Anyway, this is a new thing for me: wanting to spend more time than I have to in a pool (as opposed to “next to a pool”; I’m pretty much always happy to do that). The reason I’m finally enjoying it now is because I realized that my rationale for not swimming every day was a completely ridiculous one: I didn’t want to get my hair wet, because blowing it dry again is a pain.

Way back in 2003, I shot a commercial for Capital One in which I aged from a 1950s teenager to an eighty-year-old woman and then pushed my boyfriend into a lake, all set to the song (Now I've) Had the Time Of My Life. I can’t remember what, exactly, this had to do with credit cards, but I’m sure it was something.

The whole experience was very weird, half because it amounted to a little social experiment in how differently people treat you when you visually age 65 years overnight, and half because it involved making a plaster cast of my face. Trust me: if you're not claustrophobic before having twenty pounds of plaster poured onto your head to the point where you cannot see or move, and can breathe only through two tiny straws inserted into your nostrils, this experience would do the trick. (I for-real almost lost it, but the cute guy auditioning to play opposite me held my hand while I spent half an hour frozen in cement, so that was a plus.)

Even given the overall oddity of this experience, one of the things I recall most clearly from the shoot was the makeup artist breaking out a little machine that blew out a fine spray of makeup, and that she used to cover up my tattoo. At the time, what she was doing seemed super-fancy and complicated, but in the years since airbrushing has made the leap from something used only by pros to something that people like you and me can keep in our bags of tricks for whenever we feel like looking not just “good,” but spectacular.

The neck/décolletage area is one of those spots you (or at least I) never think about…until you do. My standard approach to skincare in that particular area has been to apply moisturizer to my face, and then rub whatever’s left over on my hands onto my neck, but in the past couple of years I’ve noticed that it’s one of the spots where I’m starting to really show signs of aging. I wish I were one of those people who has religiously applied sunscreen and moisturizer from, like, infancy…but I’m not, alas. And now I have wrinkles, and sun spots, and it’s all kind of depressing.

Time to start paying attention to the spots that have fallen into wild neglect.

I try out a lot of products. Below are some recent discoveries that are (mostly) new to the market, and that are quickly becoming serious contenders for the Favorites category.

(1) L'Oreal Infallible Pro-Matte Lip Gloss (pictured in Blushing Ambition)

When I first tried this highly pigmented lip gloss, I did a double take - because it doesn't just "dry" to a matte finish...it actually goes on matte. And somehow isn't drying at all - I've been wearing the color you see all morning and it's still right where I put it - and my lips feel completely soft and moisturized. Weird. I like it.

February 2015

This is my favorite haircut I have ever gotten. It's a shot from exactly a year ago, when Karmela (my stylist at John Sahag, who I found after reading about the salon in an Allure Magazine way back when I was in high school) and I decided to chop off my increasingly straggly post-partum locks into a bob. And I've been a bob girl ever since.

Except then I got The Really Bad Cut. I remember when I moved out to California, my mom saying "Oh you'll just have to come back to New York when you need a haircut so Karmela can do it," because apparently my mother is under the impression that I have transformed into an heiress, or perhaps just a very wealthy socialite of the Hilton genus. ("...Shall I take the private plane, mama? Or must I fly first class with the plebeians again?")