Age gracefully? No way! We prefer to age disgracefully. We’re still working every day, singing in rock bands at night, always learning and having fun. The traditional way life is lived doesn’t make much sense to us: go to school, work, retire. We’re still learning — we learned to ski in our 40’s, took tap dance lessons in our 50’s, we’ve jet skied and are learning to play the harp in our 60’s. No one better try to tell us what to do and what not to do. Cyndi Lauper, Debbie Harry, and Kate Pierson are perfect examples of boomers still rocking it and having fun. We wouldn’t dream of not having fantasy-colored hair! We have no intention of going natural, after living, loving and blazing the trail in creative hair color for 40 years! Life should be colorful ’til the end!

The “anti-aging” and “aging gracefully” messaging we’re constantly bombarded with is demeaning, insulting, sexist, and ageist. It’s natural to age, and the beauty industry needs to stop making women feel ashamed of being older. We’ve earned every wrinkle — our wrinkles are a road map of our lives, and our laugh lines are proof of how much fun we’re having. Happiness is the ultimate beauty treatment.

Society now is less judgmental than in those days in some respects, but in other ways it’s worse. With society’s unrealistic, photoshopped images, women often feel obligated to get surgery in order to keep their jobs and conform to an impossible standard of eternal youth and beauty. They’re even advertising cosmetic surgery on the New York City subway. We’re not against surgery, but we would hope that women do it for themselves and not because of outside pressure. We’re more about facials. Plastic surgery just isn’t for us (so far!).