It’s a bit of a different post today. Before we plunge into the busy-ness of Christmas I want to tell you about a special project that I’ve been working on and the thinking that brought it to life. Its focus is identity – specifically the way a woman’s sense of identity changes as she gets older. For some menopause brings a feeling of rebirth while others report a slide into invisibility. Whichever way it is there’s almost always a strong sense that you’re a different woman to the one you were before so I’ve been thinking about retaining your midlife sparkle. I’ve been trying to understand it to back up the work I do and also to underpin the book that I’m still pulling together slowly – don’t hold your breath on that though because I don’t think I’ll be able to dedicate myself to it fully until I get to a point where I’m working less.
Do we age more quickly at certain times?
Getting older is something I’ve been thinking about a lot this year because I’ve seen and felt myself ageing. I’ve already mentioned the need to adapt my gym routine because the type of very high intensity ‘strength training to failure’ that I’ve been doing over the last few years has seen me accruing too many injuries. I’ve also really noticed myself ageing visually. I have my photo taken so often for this blog that I’m probably more in touch with it from an objective perspective than I would be if I was just checking myself in the mirror now and then. And it’s interesting because last year the results of a genomics study at Stanford University confirmed that there are two particular points where you have an accelerated burst of ageing – at around age 44 and age 60. I’m almost 58 1/2 so what I’ve been perceiving makes sense – although trust me to get there early!
The study came out of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University and it tracked thousands of different molecules in people ranging from ages 25 – 75. It found that at age 44, there was a surge in terms of the risk of cardiovascular disease and also a significant reduction in the ability to metabolise caffeine, alcohol and lipids (fats and oils as well as some fat-soluble vitamins such a A, D, E and K). At around age 60 there was another surge of ageing. It included a reduction in the ability to metabolise carbohydrates as well as a change in immune regulation and kidney function and a further increase in cardiovascular disease. Molecules linked to skin and muscle ageing also had a change-surge at both ages.
Retaining your midlife sparkle
In one way it’s good to know that we aren’t imagining things; as well as growing older progressively there are specific points when it goes a little faster. But what can we do about it? I think that’s where this whole thing about feeling invisible comes in. You see I believe that it’s a cloak that can fall over us at midlife. But we don’t have to let the outward signs that we’ve aged tell our whole story, there’s power in how we feel inside. Visibility lies in our relationship with ourselves more than anything else. It’s really about chutzpah – or retaining your spark.
If you think about the older women who are most universally admired, it tends to be the ones who still have light in their eyes, people like Helen Mirren, Hannah Waddingham, Pamela Anderson, Judi Dench and the much missed Diane Keaton and Iris Apfel. They’re women who aren’t trying to look younger, instead they’re embracing their age defiantly and looking more exciting for it. As women get older it’s easier for them to stand out if they choose to. So many others decide, as is their right, that this is the time to get comfy that the chutzpah crowd really capture your interest.
And lots of people will say that it’s easy for celebrities because they have so much help but actually I don’t think that’s what the women I’ve mentioned are about. I’m not talking about the ones who have facelifts and lots of other work in an attempt to look younger than they are. I’m talking about the ones who are out there with visible wrinkles and womanly bodies… but they glow so much brighter because they glow from within. And that’s how you stop being invisible.
So how do you glow from within (and is this where I start peddling collagen supplements and CBD oils?) No, unfortunately you can’t find this kind of glow in a bottle or a pot or a packet. It’s about how you decide you’re going to feel about yourself.
How we hold ourselves back…
… as a result of our personal experiences…
Now this is so very complicated, for women it always has been. We’re like gobstoppers because we have layer upon layer of self-protection that we’ve built up to defend ourselves over the years. We’ve protected ourselves from other people and the messages that we’re bombarded with about what it means to be a woman every day. I bet if you think really hard you’ll be able to find the moment when you became horribly, cringingly self-aware and built up the first layer of your shell. For me it was at the age of eleven. Until then I’d lived in blissful ignorance of how I looked or what people thought of me and I can still remember what it was like to head into each day without any self-conscious fear. I went to a very rural primary school of 52 children and it had a very ambitious headmistress. She often put us forward for county-wide events with much bigger schools. Because there were so few of us I was always asked to sing or speak or play the guitar in front of huge audiences and it never fazed me.
But then at the age of eleven it all changed. You see we’d moved to a new village – as a result of my dad’s almost fatal heart attack he’d had to change his job. At the same time I moved from the tiny family primary school to a city grammar school so all of a sudden I knew nobody – at home or at school. So, I joined the Girl Guides in my new village where everybody else had known each other since nursery and the first badge we did was our Entertainers’ badge. We all had to think of an act to perform at the village institute in front of what felt like everybody. It was no problem for me, I knew I’d play my guitar and sing Mull of Kintyre – something I’d done so many times.
I remember waiting in the queue and the other girls asking me what I was going to do. They were much more sophisticated than the ones I’d grown up with and when I told them they said, ‘oh that’s so embarrassing, that song’s really wet.’ So I was already feeling a bit wrongfooted when I stepped onto the stage and started to sing… only to discover that my guitar was horribly out of tune. Why I didn’t just stop and sort it out I’ll never know. I just carried on singing as bravely as I could in front of the wincing faces in the audience who had to sit through it to the end. My parents were there too and when I caught my mum’s eye I could see her fury. And of course behind me were the giggles of the other girls who greeted me with a ‘well you were shit’ as I walked off the stage. That’s the day that I became self-aware. When I went home I put down my guitar and I never played it again. The whole evening still haunts me to this day.
And that’s the thing isn’t it? You learn to override these experiences of self-horror but they’re layers in your gobstopper that are always there. I think it’s one of the reasons that I have a fear of Instagram – it feels like going up on that stage again in front of a sea of faces that I don’t know. And those faces are so quick to send a DM telling me that I’m as bad as I fear – and suddenly I’m back to being eleven years old again.
… and the lessons we learn from the women in our lives…
As women we not only carry our own experiences but often the legacy of our mothers too because they had gobstopper layers of their own. I loved my mum very much even though she didn’t make it easy; she was very exacting with a furious temper that often lashed out. She was career focused and so I don’t have a lot of memories of mother-daughter times with her until she retired much later. There is one though. I must have been about six and I remember her suggesting we walk to the village shop for some sweets. We never did that and I remember skipping ahead of her all the way in excitement. When we got there I chose a little bag of Cadbury’s Treats (who remembers them – they were like spherical chocolate buttons) and she chose a Mint Cracknell chocolate bar. I was never allowed a chocolate bar, they were for grown-ups and I used to dream of the day when I’d have one and lay it on the table, unwrapping it carefully and then savouring it square by square. When we got home I sat down to eat my sweets but Mum didn’t and I asked her why.
“It’s gone,” she said and showed me the empty wrapper as she put it in the bin. Over the years I saw her do this countless times – buy a bar of chocolate and eat it guiltily without taking it out of her pocket. It was almost as if she believed that if she didn’t see herself doing it, it didn’t happen. The thing is that my mum battled with her weight all of her life. I never knew her not to be on a diet of some sort and yet she was always a size 18-20. Dieting was one of the many examples she set that I have always been determined not to follow but I do have a complicated and guilty relationship with chocolate.
In a heartbreaking conversation this all came full circle when she was dying of cancer. In the November of 2011 she moved from the hospital to the hospice for the very last time. She’d been in and out quite often but even though she wouldn’t/couldn’t acknowledge it, we all suspected that this was the end. Over the weeks that followed she battled hard and I spent a lot of hours sitting by her bed. There seemed to be things she wanted to get off her chest and we had some important conversations.
There was one day when the nurses brought her dinner – the food is always superb in our local hospice and they asked her if she’d like a glass of wine. And it was at this moment that I saw tears start to fall. She turned to me and said, “whatever happens to you in life from now on, you must really enjoy the good food. All my life I’ve deprived myself or if I have eaten something I’ve made myself feel bad about it. It’s too late now, I’m at the end. I can no longer taste anything, I can no longer smell anything. I wish I’d just let myself enjoy everything while I could.”
And if you read any hospice worker’s memoir you’ll see that that is always one of the top regrets of the dying – “I wish I’d allowed myself to enjoy it all more.”
To hell with ‘not enough’ thinking!
You must wonder where I’m going with all of this but I’m trying to illustrate that more often than not, we are the ones who hold ourselves back. We are the ones who don’t allow ourselves to enjoy life more. Either because we remember a time when things went wrong and so we avoid the risk of it happening again… like I still do after messing up an Entertainers’ badge at the age of eleven for goodness sake! Or we think we’re not thin enough like my mum did. Or we think we’re not good enough, not pretty enough, not clever enough, not young enough, not funny enough, not well-dressed enough, not fit enough, not cool enough… it goes on and on and on.
And the thing is that if we don’t stop the ‘not enough’ thinking we’re all going to find ourselves in the same place as my mum… at the very end of our lives and filled with regret.
BUT – if we do stop the ‘not enough’ thinking then we’ll turn into one of those glorious midlife women who brims with verve… Helen Mirren, Hannah Waddingham, Pamela Anderson, Judi Dench… You see I think we become invisible because we allow our ‘not enough’ feelings to subdue our spark. And of course there’s the popular fridge magnet slogan that declares, ‘I am enough’ but it’s more than that. Every midlife women is so much more than just enough, she’s the sum of everything she’s lived through, good and bad… all of those multi-coloured gobstopper layers. She’s absolutely magnificent – and her spark should shine as brightly as Sirius.
In the end though it’s down to us and whether we choose to shine. Nobody else is going to come along with a can of polish and make us sparkle – only we can dig deep and do that. I find that mantras or affirmations help and so now I hope you’ll understand the project I’ve been working on.
A talisman to keep you moving forward
Those of you who’ve been to one of the recent Midlifechic get togethers already know my friend Claudia Bradby. Hopefully you gleaned from our sometimes rambling fireside chats that we have a meeting of minds. Claudia’s been quietly celebrating 25 years of running her jewellery business this year and as part of her celebrations she offered me the chance to do something a bit unusual. Back in the spring she asked me if I’d be up for designing something with her. She gave me completely free rein but I knew straightaway what I wanted to do.
Bien dans ma peau
I wanted to create something that would act as a talisman for every woman (or man) who wore it. I wanted it to work as a daily reminder to be visible – to be confident in who you are. I knew exactly the message I needed it to convey. It was ‘bien dans ma peau’ which, as I’m sure you know, is the French way of saying “I’m happy with myself the way I am” or literally ‘good in my skin.’ I like the thought of as many people as possible going about their day wearing this quiet statement of self-assurance quite literally next to the skin that they’re feeling good in.
When you feel good about yourself your spark ignites and all the best parts of you shine through effortlessly. You just have to give yourself a continuing quiet vote of confidence.
Bien dans ma peau – Claudia Bradby x Midlifechic
Before I show you what we’ve come up with, let me tell you a little bit about the work behind it. You have no idea how much goes into creating a piece of jewellery – or at least I didn’t! As soon as Claudia invited me to work on the project I was keen to have a meeting and bring my vision to life. You see I’m an ideas person, I’m really good at imagining things – but I’m not a completer-finisher and it was good to be part of a team.
So you have to imagine our meeting and I’m there bubbling over about a bangle that will work as a talisman… and poor Claudia at the design end is trying to work out how it will look so that she can think of a way of making it. In the end the only way I could describe it was that it had to sit flat against the skin like a piece of tagliatelle with the words inscribed so that the wearer could see them at all times, regardless of what she was doing.
Claudia of course as a jeweller works in sets so she wanted to know what the accompanying necklace or earrings would look like but my mind was on my bangle and I couldn’t think beyond it. And so this has been a true collaboration because she brought out some drawings she’d done a long time ago of turtle shells, that was when we knew we had a collection. You see a turtle’s shell is protective, a bit like our gobstopper layers and it grows and changes along with the turtle, adapting to its challenges and environment… just like we do. Each turtle shell is also unique, just like a midlife woman with her accrued experiences.
So we had a vision and the next thing was for Claudia’s team to start developing the bangle that was very clear in my mind. And we went through a number of stages because I knew what I wanted and it took a while to get it right. We refined the weight, the width, the finish on the edges, the polish and the way we were going to integrate a pearl… because there has to be a pearl. The one thing that just wasn’t working out was the font because as always, the words were so important for me. And so that’s where I brought Mal in. He created a bespoke font for us that felt exactly right.
The bien dans ma peau collection
I’ve lost count of the number of iterations that we’ve been through with either Claudia, Mal or me adjusting something each time. I had no idea how tricky it is to make something that is utterly simple but beautiful. Last week it finally arrived – and we all loved it. Most of the pieces will arrive in mid-November with the bangles following in early December so today we’re releasing the collection exclusively to Midlifechic readers. I also have an exclusive 20% discount code for you on the range if you pre-order – BIEN20 (valid until 25th December on all of Claudia’s full price pieces).
The bangles are going to run as a limited edition so if you order one now you can be sure to have one, otherwise there will be only a small number available to buy from Claudia’s site in December. Please note that if you pre-order, you won’t receive your jewellery until the dates above but you’ll really help Claudia to know what stock levels to order.
Let me show you what we have. Here’s my beloved bangle in the gold oval version…
Gold bien dans ma peau oval bangle; gold bien dans ma peau chain bracelet; pearl bracelet
And in the silver oval version...
Silver oval bien dans ma peau bangle; silver bien dans ma peau chain bracelet; pearl bracelet;
You'll notice that we have a pretty little 'bien dans ma peau' chain bracelet too. The thing is that my bangle is a special piece - Mal always says that I'm like a truffle hound for quality and so it will be a very limited edition. However I wanted the collection to be worn by as many people as possible and so we created a lower priced option to work as a talisman too.
Everyone at the Birmingham event had a sneak preview of the bangles and it was great to get feedback even though we were still only halfway though the design stages then. One thing that was really helpful was discovering that the 65mm oval bangle didn't work for everyone's wrist size. So for anyone with a wider wrist, Claudia's created a 65mm round version with more room that makes it easier to slip on and off. And if you feel you need a round bangle in a 70mm diameter we can have one made for you, just let us know.
Oval bangle on the left; round on the right
And here are our beautiful turtle shell inspired necklaces, to remind us that we each have our own unique skin that we've built up over the years - and now we're quite happy with the one we're in. We've made them in both silver and gold in a larger version...
Bien dans ma peau pendant in gold and silver
And a smaller one...
Micro 'bien dans ma peau' necklace in gold or silver
This gives you an idea of how the collection looks worn together.
Silver oval bien dans ma peau bangle; silver bien dans ma peau chain bracelet; silver bien dans ma peau necklace; pearl bracelet; Coco epée earrings
And so this is where I sit anxiously and pray that my message lands with you and that I haven't wasted an awful lot of Claudia's time and investment. Each piece carries a unique little monogram that Mal designed too and I love to imagine having that Midlifechic link with you as you go about the day, almost a secret token of belonging to our midlife friendship tribe.
I'm hoping that these pieces will be worn by women of all ages, if I had a daughter it's exactly the message I'd want to launch her into her life with. And (this brings a lump to my throat) if I still had a mum, I'd hope that it would help her to make peace with herself.
We've deliberately made each piece very tactile so that it really works as a talisman, on a day when you need it, you'll be able to rub the message like Aladdin's lamp and find your strength. As I've already said, you have a launch discount of 20% off with code BIEN20 (valid until 25th December on all of Claudia's full priced pieces). I want to thank Claudia for everything she does with me, both this and the events we all enjoy. They say 'never work with friends' but I can't imagine anything nicer, especially on a project like this. I'm so pleased that my very first brand collaboration is one that carries the message that I send to anyone who reads this blog...
PS just in case you haven't spotted it...
I feel a duty to let you know that the M&S X 16 Arlington collab went live yesterday and for once it's one that's really worth looking at. It's the best I've seen since the old Uniqlo X Inès de La Fressange days... and it REALLY gives Me+Em a run for their money. It's sexy, sassy and super chic, I wish I had a reason to buy the silver sequinned dress. As it is I've gone for the beautifully cut satin shirt which will be perfect with jeans, either for going out or just worn to add a bit of a gleam of light beneath a cardigan. I'm just hoping that the shade of blue is warm enough for my skintone, it's hard to tell from the shots. And while we're on the subject of new drops of gorgeous clothing, the big new winter one from Me+Em goes live today too here.
