Recently, I was up in San Francisco, and was shocked at how little plastic surgery I saw.  Living in SoCal I had largely forgotten that most people are not actually blond and that the average 50-year-old woman doesn’t naturally have the full, perky breasts of a Barbie doll.  I saw people with…brown hair.  Boobs that didn’t resemble globes.  Facial expressions.  And they were eating food.  Really good food.

While we were in SF I celebrated another birthday…one that is precariously close to a rather large number.  I started realizing that I had outgrown certain things.  One of those is the hope that someday I’d be perfect. I’m appreciating that being flat-chested means I can sleep on my stomach.  That my stick-straight hair can only really successfully be stick straight.  That my inability to do just one thing at a time enables me to, well, do more than one thing at a time.  And I’ve come to know that I’m officially too old for some of the clothes in the catalogs I still get, and no matter what anyone says it’s ridiculous for a woman of my age to be wearing a micro-mini.

One thing for which you can never be too old, thankfully, is jewelry.  While the world most likely no longer appreciate viewing a large swath of my thigh anymore, they’d surely enjoy a well-positioned delicacy made of semi-precious stones, something that says “maybe I can’t wear short skirts and over-the-knee boots anymore but I can afford better costume jewelry now”.  I saw this Ippolita Wonderland Party Ring in the Bloomingdales catalog, juxtaposed to a stack of a dozen or so rock-candy bangles with gorgeous hammered workmanship and thought, yeah, that still works.  At $795 a pop you’d hope to be going to a lot of cocktail parties to get your money’s worth, but nice work, Ippolita — the online photo doesn’t do it justice.