Getting the Pretty Back

by Molly Ringwald

  Yes, I did get whistled at more by construction workers. But I also had the curiously paradoxical sensation of being invisible. I was like one of those superheroes who watches life from behind a disguise. Instead of the redheaded me that I identified with, there was this strange blond version that received a completely different kind of attention. People spoke to me a little bit louder and attempted to explain things very clearly, as though I wouldn’t understand them. It was the first time in my life that I had ever been treated like a dumb blonde. To add insult to injury, there was a young and beautiful natural blonde cast as the ingénue, but it was decided that her character was to be a redhead. She had to deal with the crew mistakenly calling her “Molly” (though she was very good-natured about it). I had to deal with feeling like my identity had been stolen. You never quite realize that you have an identity until you feel that it has been taken away from you.

  But there are times in your life when you don’t want to be you. You want to be new, different, unrecognizable. And each time, I get the same flack from hairdressers.

  “But it’s your trademark!”

  Yes, I know, I tell them—which is precisely why I want to change. For a couple of years when I lived in France I had dark brown, almost black hair. I’m not sure exactly what precipitated this. Perhaps I thought I might blend in a little bit better? I moved to France in my early twenties, hot on the heels of being one of the most recognized people in the United States. Living in a foreign country gave me the kind of anonymity that I hadn’t experienced since I was a child. Having a head full of red hair doesn’t exactly give you the same sort of anonymity that dark brown hair does. There are times in your life when you want to stand out, and then other moments when you want to blend in and observe.

  Inevitably, though, I would feel the urge to get back to myself, and along comes the red hair. It’s funny, but I feel that when the red color returns to my hair, it’s like I’ve found myself again. I’m comfortable at last.

  Then there is the question of what you are supposed to do with your hair as you get older. In our society, it’s tacitly understood that you are allowed to experiment with your hair in your youth, and then at some point every woman is supposed to chop her hair off, let all the hair color grow out, and just sort of de-sexualize herself. Give up on being attractive. Surrender the exotic and the erotic, suspend all effort and interest. I disagree. Not to say that there aren’t women who look fabulous with silver hair, but I don’t agree with any rules that try to tell us what women should or shouldn’t do as they get older. I do think that hair really does represent where we are at in our life. If we are feeling sexy, our hair will reflect it. When it comes to style and self-image, not to mention simple self-assurance, one of the worst things that we can do as women is to announce to the world that we don’t care about our hair. So wash your hair. Get those highlights. And stay away from the box color in the drugstore. I promise you, nothing good will come of it.

  MAKING UP IS NOT HARD TO DO

  With the exception of the few miserable months I spent as a blonde packing makeup on my skin, for the most part I wear next to no makeup in my real life (meaning, my life not spent on the set, or in front of a still camera). I’ve been asked by various beauty magazines what three makeup supplies I would take to a desert island—which granted is a ridiculous question, since vanity is in pretty short supply on desert islands—but for argument’s sake, let’s say this is an island that you are marooned on with some cute guy. What three makeup supplies would I bring? A tinted sunscreen, a light lip gloss with a touch of color that tastes really great, and a great pair of tweezers.

  The tweezers always surprises them. But eyebrows, believe it or not, are important. The recent brow craze shouldn’t be seen as a craze at all but rather the return of something essential that had been inexplicably forgotten. Check out old films from the forties. Those ladies got the importance of a good brow. Lauren Bacall’s seductive line in To Have and Have Not—“You know how to whistle, don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow”—granted is a great line, and her lips and hair are fantastic, but in my opinion, it’s the brows that really sell it. The brows are what frame the face, and everyone should know how to take good care of them.

  Hopefully no one will make the same idiotic mistake I made in my early twenties. My mother always told me, “Never shave off your eyebrows, they will never grow back.” I don’t really know why she told me this, since who shaves off their brows anyway? Part of me wonders if she hadn’t drummed this weird warning into my head, maybe I never would have considered testing it. Why couldn’t she have just counseled me against tattoos, like most mothers? So let me tell you, in case there is any lingering doubt: they don’t grow back. Or at least, they don’t look the same. I shaved mine off—not all the way, just halfway, thinking I could draw them in better. I looked like a demented elf for about a year. And when they finally did grow back in, they were thinner, sparser, like the needles of a Christmas tree thrown out in March. It’s never fun when your mother is right about something.

  SKIN CARE

  I’ve given you my opinions on the importance of skin care, but since nothing is quite as persuasive as the opinion of a doctor in a white lab coat (ten thousand TV commercials can’t possibly be wrong), I asked my friend who happens to be a dermatologist to weigh in on the issue too. Dr. David Colbert, the author of The High School Reunion Diet (high school, again! Can’t get away from it…), helpfully provided me with his most important tips on how to take care of your skin.

  SUNBLOCK: Do the “squint test” to determine the SPF: if you can’t look directly at the sky without squinting, then you will need an SPF of 15 or higher. Sunblock will protect those fragile-as-cashmere fibers in your dermis called collagen. If you wash that priceless Bergdorf Goodman black cashmere dress in laundry detergent and throw it in the dryer you will basically end up with shriveled shrunken deformed heat-destroyed protein fibrils. Ditto for your skin, ladies. Wear the block—end of story!

  RETIN-A: Since its discovery over forty years ago it is the one FDA-approved drug that is proven to really stimulate collagen production. A $95 tube should cost $1,000 for the work it does and the money it will save you as the years roll by. My own mother was a Retin-A experiment-in-the-making, starting to use it in the eighties. Now she enjoys flawless skin at sixty-eight and her thirty-two-year-old Argentine polo player boyfriend agrees!

  BETTER LIVING THROUGH CHEMISTRY: Don’t be afraid of scientific innovation. If it weren’t for science we’d have never made it past the Plague. That means you should stay up-to-date and use what’s available to look and feel younger. That includes a host of lasers, injectables, creams, micro-liposuction, and any new effective technique. Be bold, as long as you are under the care of a board-certified cosmetic dermatologist (not a plastic surgeon, since we don’t want you to look plastic).

  LET THERE BE LIGHT: Repair your reckless-youth, sun-damaged face, hands, neck, and décolletage by doing IPL (intensed pulse light), Fraxel, Titan, or Triads. These are the must-dos to repair your skin from the inside out. They will erase brown spots, red spots, broken blood vessels, and big pores. Guaranteed.

  WEED THE GARDEN: Keeping your body free of weirdly appearing and persistently hanging little benign growths or skin tags (on the neck, underarms, back, groin, anywhere) is just good skin grooming, as is removing haphazardly appearing brown spots. These take seconds to remove, and it is a painless procedure. Keeping the skin clear helps to keep it young, since many of these growths would eventually take over if given the chance.

  SKIN CANCER SCREENING: Everyone should have a twice yearly skin cancer screening. Why? Imagine if we could predict breast, lung, or colon cancer before it could spread and hurt us without having a mammogram or a chest X-ray. When it comes to our skin we can see and diagnose skin cancers early on and save lives. There is no excuse not to have all moles checked regularly. That means all growths on the skin. The most serious is melanoma, followed by squamous cell car
cinoma and basal cell carcinoma. Go to www.skincancer.org and learn what skin cancers look like and how to spot them on you and your loved ones. Do it right now.

  PUT THAT IN YOUR PIPE, AND DON’T SMOKE IT

  I sometimes look longingly at my virgin teenaged eyebrows, but can’t get over the amount of makeup I used to wear as a teenager. Was it just me or was it the eighties?

  Of course, it makes sense that I would have worn so much makeup as a teenager. Teenagers love makeup, and I was no exception. But the fact remains that the older you get, the less makeup you should wear. It’s hard for me to say this, even now—as far as I’ve come, I’m still susceptible to the siren’s call of a Sephora (it’s all the packaging, I swear. Little potions and pots)—but the best advice I could give anyone is to take all the money that they would spend on makeup in a year and invest it in a good dermatologist. And I’m not saying that you need to get Botoxed from here to Sunday, just get your skin in the best possible shape it can be. Did you have acne as a teen? Go for microdermabrasion. Were you a sun worshipper? Get a series of peels. Did you smoke? You can fill those little pucker marks.

  Do you still smoke? Quit. This is the time of your life when having confidence is a real asset. If you don’t have confidence in yourself, who will? Smoking doesn’t look sexy. It reeks of desperation, and it doesn’t smell good. Then there’s the whole pesky cancer thing. Do yourself, your family, and your older self a great big favor: quit. And then take all of the money that you would have spent on cigarettes in a year and do something fun for yourself. Go on vacation. Buy a new computer. Go shopping at Barneys. If you’re buying a pack of cigarettes a day, at ten dollars a pack, that adds up—$3,650 a year buys a lot of cashmere.

  Just to make sure that I don’t sound too “holier than thou,” I’m the first to admit that I was not immune to the smoking trap myself. Much to the dismay of my mother and father, I took up smoking at age fifteen and smoked pretty much nonstop for another fifteen years. I can’t say exactly what it was that kept me in smoking’s thrall for as long as it did, but it did. What a joy it was to move to a country (France) where smoking was not only tolerated but encouraged. After the antismoking laws were passed in New York City, whenever I was in town I dragged my friends to the same three or four restaurants that tolerated smoking. I ardently identified with the smokers of the world and rolled my eyes at anyone who didn’t support my habit. Every time I bought a pack of cigarettes, I couldn’t help but feel that I was unwrapping a little Christmas gift in its white-and-gold packaging. I never got over the sordid little thrill.

  But as my twenties wore on and the thirties loomed closer, I knew that I would have to quit. Going to see an old movie with a beautiful young woman smoking looks glamorous. Check out that same woman in her seventies. If she still looks good, I’ll bet money she quit. If she’s still smoking, she probably looks terrible—or she’s not around anymore. It’s harsh, but there is just no avoiding it. You shouldn’t smoke in the first place, but if you happen to get sucked in, hurry up and get yourself free. One day you will have to quit; it’s better to do it before you have damaged yourself beyond repair.

  Of course, quitting is incredibly hard. I struggled for years to quit, with varying degrees of success. Finally I went to go see a “professional.” Mostly, to be honest, I went to get my friends and family off my back. They had stepped up their requests that were beginning to verge on pleading. And a woman whom I adored—my studio teacher for years, Irene Brafstein—lost a very long and painful battle with lung cancer and emphysema. Irene took up smoking as a teenager in Brighton Beach in the forties.

  I wish I could say that I saw Irene and quit the next day, but I didn’t. It took a bit longer for me to find myself in the “professional’s” office. I sat there sullenly and listened as he outlined his system. He charged eighty dollars per session, and he saw people for a total of only three sessions. I was seen for four. He said that I was “resistant,” which, upon hearing, I couldn’t help but feel a perverse sense of pride. I was no lightweight social smoker, I was the real thing! I can’t remember exactly what was said during those sessions, but what I do remember is that he was incredibly adept at knocking down every possible argument that I brought up as an impediment to quitting. I suggested that maybe I didn’t really want to quit. He said that I wouldn’t be there if I didn’t.

  “It’s supposed to be harder than heroin,” I told him, repeating something that I had parroted over the years.

  He shook his head. “It’s not. I’ve worked with both. Heroin is infinitely harder to treat.”

  “Oh.”

  “But nevertheless, it is a very strong addiction.”

  He made me visualize the desire to smoke as an addict living within me. He further suggested that I look at my “addict” as a very wily four-year-old child who was better at manipulating me than anyone else because, well, it was me. She knew all of my secrets. She knew my buttons, my weakest moments. It was up to me, the adult, to keep the little brat in check.

  “You wouldn’t give a loaded gun to a four-year-old child, would you?”

  “Obviously not,” I snapped. Then feeling guilty, I added a lame joke. “What, do you think I’m a Republican?”

  He ignored me. This guy was not big on humor, but he did have a lot to pack in during those four sessions.

  “Well, it’s the same thing. Because, make no mistake, it’s the same thing. Smoking will kill you.”

  “But what about all those ninety-year-olds that—”

  “They’re an exception. Do you really want to be on that side of the statistic?”

  He then proceeded to elucidate on the effects of smoking, in lurid, incredibly descriptive, downright cinematic detail. (I later found out that this therapist only saw smokers as a side gig. His “regular” job was counseling terminally ill cancer patients on pain management.) I couldn’t help but picture my beloved teacher in her last moments. Irene was put on a list for surgery to treat the emphysema when they discovered the lung cancer in the preliminary tests. When I asked her what it was like trying to breathe with the emphysema, she pointed to one of those little red-and-white straws that you stir your coffee with, the tiny ones that aren’t really for drinking, just for stirring. “Try to breathe through that…all of the time,” she told me.

  Somehow it got through to me. Maybe it was the right moment for me. I wish that I could have found that moment some time in my twenties, or even better if I had never taken it up in the first place, but man am I glad that I quit in my thirties and not my forties. I still love it when my husband takes a whiff of my hair and tells me it smells great.

  There comes a point in your life when you are encouraged, however subtly, to stop changing your look. Conventional wisdom tells us, at a certain age, that you should have found your look by now and stopped searching. But the nonconformist in me rebels at the thought of giving up on experimentation in order to prove my maturity. I never thought I’d disagree with Givenchy, but while he was a master of the cloth—and certainly did right by Audrey Hepburn—as a hair psychologist, he had his limitations. “Hair style is the final tip-off whether or not a woman really knows herself.” Oh, Hubert, do we ever really know ourselves? We are always evolving. Hair can be as good a barometer of that progression as any. And while there are obvious mistakes that we can learn from (never cut your bangs with toenail clippers) as well as proven successes (I, for one, expect to remain a redhead for most of my life), like anything else, it’s all about enjoying the ride. So go ahead. Experiment! Color, curl, feather, flip, tease, and twist and when it’s time…cut. Because in the end—unlike any other choice you make and will be stuck with your whole life—your hair? It always grows back.

  Chapter Four

  WHO’S GOT YOUR BACK?

  YEARS AGO I SAT WITH MY FRIEND DARCY IN A BAR IN LONDON. We were discussing motherhood, which had been on the forefront of my mind, since I was in my early thirties and, as every medical journal never tires of screaming at us, once you
pass the age of thirty-five it’s time to get the show on the road. Darcy announced to me that she had little interest in children and that she suspected she would be happy to remain childless. I brushed off her sentiments and basically told her that she would grow out of it. My friend bristled and, rightly, took issue with my condescension and inability to see anything outside my narrow scope of reference. I wanted to have kids, so I incorrectly assumed that everyone else wanted to. This brief incident embarrasses me even now as I think about it. Fortunately almost a decade later we are still friends. Me, happily married with a family, Darcy happily childless and still holding tryouts for Mr. Right.

  How grateful I am now to have friends without children! As much as I do appreciate those with kids—the fact that you can meet any mother on the playground, point out your respective offspring, and boom! insta-quasi friendship—there is nothing like getting together with a friend over a glass of wine and talking about something other than your kids. These friends are extremely valuable, and too often these friendships are thrown out with the bathwater.

  When I get together with Darcy, our conversation covers a diverse range of topics, from relationships to politics, from books to boys, from my latest projects to her latest students. (Darcy is a writer and recently minted teacher to a few very lucky students.) Children are certainly not off limits in our discussions, but I do find that we end up talking more about ourselves, and I find myself being reminded of the person that I was before so much of my every waking moment revolved around these other little creatures. How easy it is for us to forget ourselves! As my nonparent friends inadvertently remind me, it is up to us to keep it together, to make time for the gym, to take the time to do whatever it is that we like to do, reminding ourselves of who we are as separate beings, apart from the relationships dearest to us.