Perhaps the Trick is Caring for Your Soul

Part 2, You're Meant to Lose It

I write about old-world style for modern times and feature essays, photography, podcasts, recipes & inspiration. All about beauty by hand, ancestral traditions, slowing down, living well, food from scratch, gardening, preserving & other sundry ways to live beautifully. If you’d like access to the full spectrum of what I publish, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

This is a follow up to my recent article, “You’re Meant to Lose It,” where I wrote about our society’s obsession with anti-aging, botox, and clinging to a youthful kind of beauty. In this installment, I’m going to share some things I do, and plan to do as the years go on, to support my body into aging as brightly and beautifully as it can. These include products, therapies and accoutrement.

I’ve been a bit surprised at the so-called comebacks of two very famous, now older women who were once headline grabbing names in 1990’s America—Martha Stewart and

Pamela Anderson

. As someone facing the reality that my younger years are behind me and my aging years ahead, it’s refreshing to see it’s not just the younguns who can still take center stage and inspire the rest of us. Interestingly, both women’s renaissance is centered on connection to creativity (cooking, acting, fashion) and nature (gardening, growing flowers, caring for animals). While these passions are nothing new for Martha Stewart, those of us who remember Baywatch, a radically tattooed Tommy Lee and the infamous “sex tape” scandal that hovered over the mid ‘90’s, it all does seem surprising for Pamela Anderson, who was once as glam as they come and not known for the natural look or natural living.

Who knew that the sex siren, the Playboy bunny also loved to quietly journal, cook for her family, plant carrots and grow bleeding hearts? As you may already know, in 2023 she sparked some buzz for going makeup free at Paris Fashion week, in a time when most celebrities, as well as suburban mothers, won’t even leave their bedrooms without proper botox injections and when those who attend fashion week usually take hours to get professionally styled before appearing in public. It’s all been rather refreshing to watch, and if Anderson’s renewed popularity at 57 years old, including among those of us who never cared too much for her style before, is any bellwether, I’m not the only one who finds it so.

Pamela Anderson in a new phase of life. Photo courtesy of “Better Homes & Gardens”

As things usually do, it’s got me thinking. What is it about Anderson’s makeup free look, her Hulu show, “Pamela’s Garden of Eden,” where she renovates a sprawling familial property on Vancouver Island, and her most recent cooking show, “Pamela's Cooking With Love,” where she appears in long, flowy prairie-style dresses, meandering through her garden with a wicker basket dangling from her arm, that’s so darn appealing?

“I don’t know what happened over the last few decades,” Anderson told Better Homes & Gardens in August of last year (Pamela Anderson in Better Homes & Gardens?!), “but I feel now so far removed from the image of who I was. I felt very sad and lonely. I didn’t feel just misunderstood, I felt like I had really screwed up, that my whole life was a bundle of mistakes….I came to a point where I decided to move home and disappear and get into my garden. And when I started building the garden, it was really like a metaphor of putting my life back together. I began planting seeds, and the smallest things became really profound.”

To begin with, genuine is nearly always appealing, and she seems genuine. You get the sense, although of course I cannot prove this, that even if the cameras had never come back and the world was not watching, she’d still be growing fennel and planting pink roses. You get the sense that she’d still be journaling, cooking with fresh ingredients and fine tuning the glow of her inner light. Anderson is touching on a popular theme nowadays—a return to a simpler way of living in a time when the pace and technology of life has most of us feeling subhuman. (

Ballerina Farm

’s 10 million followers on Instagram alone can attest to this.) Anderson’s new iteration takes her from glam and glitz back to basics and the beauty of natural living.

And perhaps, my friends, that’s exactly the secret to naturally aging beautifully—getting back to the fundamental and the elemental. When you’re young, you can be a real bitch and still be beautiful on the outside; people may not like you that much, but regardless, hats will still tip to your physical beauty. When we’re older, however, the inner bitterness, the inner ugliness really does morph the outer beauty into something hard to look at and to be around. Conversely, plenty of older women these days are artificially maintaining beauty standards, but they don’t necessarily emanate beauty.

Older beauty, and natural beauty, is a spiritual light; it radiates through your eyes, your hair, your cheeks like a small, cultivated and tended flame. It’s the subtle glow of a beeswax candle, not the blazing lights of Broadway, and Anderson appears to have discovered this.

So perhaps, then, one of the tricks to staying beautiful into old age is to take care of your soul. It’s to find and do, as Pamela seems to have done, the things that light you up; to shed the constructed outer and let grow in its place something more natural, more enduring, more not of this world. Something that will outlive the body. Something that transcends physicality and points to the mysteries and beauties of nature and the spirit.

This is a practice, one that we’ll probably be involved in cultivating for as long as we continue to live, but there are certainly rituals, treatments and products we can use now that align with this approach to beauty and will support our bodies and our skin in holding that natural light.

I want to share some of the clean products and treatments I currently use, as well as some of the non-invasive, non-toxic, non-surgical things I’ve noticed older women do that keep them looking beautiful and vibrant. This is not an exhaustive list, and I’m not even touching on supplements and herbs, which I’ll perhaps circle back to in another installment. Just a note that none of these brands or recommendations are sponsored! I just love them. :)