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.