As the blissful June sun begins to radiate, many of us start to feel a familiar sense of dread: “Makeup Meltdown.” Between the rising humidity and the unpredictable nature of hot flashes, keeping our faces looking fresh past 10:00 AM can feel like a game of wack-a mole.

Rather than the constant touchup and drooling mascara, let’s add some tools that help keep everything looking fresh and pretty, even when the rest of you is evaporating. This summer, we are moving away from heavy, cakey products and embracing a routine that is breathable, water-resistant, and, most importantly, reliable.

The Basis of Heat-Resistance: The Primer

If you skip every other step this summer, do not skip your primer. Use one that creates a matte finish, adheres foundation to the skin, and controls shine and oil with or without foundation.

On Edna, my model, I added some hydration and, once the product had set into her skin, I followed with a Prime Prometics Skin Primer. It feels silky and smooth, stays on all day, and blurs fine lines and pores for a beautiful finish.

Pro-Tip: Use your fingers to apply your primer. The warmth of your hands helps the product melt into the skin, ensuring every nook and cranny is protected.

Less Is Best: Strategic Application of Color

When it’s 80 degrees outside, a heavy foundation is your worst enemy. It’s the first thing to “break” when you sweat. Instead, reach for a light coverage foundation like a tinted moisturizer or a CC cream, and only use it in your t-zone or where you need it, rather than all over. If you are able, don’t wear any at all, just a little concealer to hide any dark or discolored parts.

Application

On Edna, I used a CC Cream and applied it to her t-zone. Because Edna has some redness around her eyes, I also added it over and under her eye area. If you do not have oily lids, this works very well and can keep you from using too much concealer.

Concealer

Only use where you need it, the more you add, the worse it can look.

Bronzer + Blush

Cream products work fantastically in hot weather, and can have greater staying power than powders. Plus, since we are using less foundation, bronzer and blush add color and warmth to an otherwise flat appearance. Be sure to blend in circular motions and be very thorough to avoid streaky lines!

The “Raccoon Eye” Solution: Water Resistant Everything

We’ve all been there; you look in the mirror at lunch and realize your mascara has migrated to your under-eyes, and then your belly button. In the summer, humidity softens traditional waxes in mascara, causing them to smudge. It’s important to choose a mascara, eye shadows, and eye liners that are water repellant or water resistant to avoid this.

Mascara

On Edna I used a tubing mascara that doesn’t smudge in hot temperatures and comes off with warm water. For this video, I used black, but it can be fun to try different colors like Mulberry, Emerald, and Smoke.

Eye Shadows

Cream eye shadows are easy to apply and stay put. On Edna, I used a bronze shade called Nebula both around her eye and in the crease, and it really made her eye color jump out.

Eye Liner

For eye liner I used Wood, a warm brown shade, and rimmed her entire eye with it. The trick here is to blend with a soft brush to remove any harsh lines.

Pro Tip: Because makeup tends to fade more quickly in summer, apply a little more eyeliner on the outer edge of your eye than you normally would.Also try putting liner in the waterline, as this adds punch to an otherwise boring look.

How to Keep Lipstick in Place

I swear I have eaten about a hundred lipsticks in my day. I tend to roll my lips when I concentrate, so lipstick lasts under 30 minutes on me at all times. Because of this, I use a specific technique to keep lip shades in place. Do these steps in order:

• Foundation on lips: If your lips are dry, this works even better.
• Fill in lips with liner: Use a neutral lipliner about the same color as your lips.
• Layer lipstick: Apply lipstick, then powder on lips, then lipstick again.

For summer, I prefer a lip gloss or balm, and the above technique works as long as you are not using a clear product. These tricks also keep the lip balm from spreading into fine lines or joining your mascara in your belly button.

A Word on Face Powder and Setting Spray

Even with a translucent face powder, reapplying can cause pilling and that awful cakey look. For this reason, I avoid powder unless the skin is especially oily. Dabbing with tissue or specific papers for oily skin works well if needed, but I find that a well placed primer can help do away with powder completely. As far as setting spray goes, use it if it tickles your fancy. I lean away from them because they can contain toxic ingredients, so do your homework.

Summer Is Da Bomb!

Summer should be about enjoying the garden, the beach, and the company of friends, not worrying about your makeup. By choosing products designed for the specific chemistry of mature skin, you can feel confident that your glow is intentional, not sweat-induced!

You can find all the products mentioned in today’s tutorial at PrimePrometics.com.

Exclusive Offer: Use code THEBEAUTYSHAMAN at checkout for 10% off your entire order!

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What’s your favorite summer makeup product? How do you keep makeup from melting in the hot and humid months? Any products that work particularly well?

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Photo: @doritkemsley

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As a certified mindfulness meditation teacher, I have taught these practices in different spaces, and one of my favorites was teaching in my community’s park and recreation programs. Interestingly over the years the classes I offered expanded from teaching mindfulness/meditation to facilitating workshops on transitioning to retirement and healthy aging. This happened as my mindfulness classes were often attended by older women and the concerns and conversations organically shifted to challenges in this period of our lives.

In describing these workshops, I intentionally use the word facilitate rather than teach because my hope is that we all learn from each other. I am not a mental health professional, I am not an expert, I am not a professional retirement coach, I am just on this journey myself. After being in the mindfulness-meditation world since before it was “hip,” I have been exposed to many of the concerns of women in our age group and have created tools that are often found helpful.

One topic I like to share is learning from our past regrets, something I learned from Daniel Pink. While not a psychologist, Pink’s work focuses on behavioral psychology, a topic I find fascinating, and what I learned from his book, The Power of Regret, is something that I have incorporated into my own life and shared with women who have taken my workshops.

Who Has Regrets?

My husband is a fan of saying he has “no regrets,” that his life experiences have made him who he is and he wouldn’t change a thing. Of course there is great truth to that, but for many of us when we look back at our lives we may think “I wish I had/hadn’t done that.” For many, looking back at things they wish they’d done differently can be very painful. Regret can be painful, but examined regret can teach us so much moving forward.

Types of Regret

How do we examine regret though the lens of learning and growing? How can we learn from these experiences to see how they can positively change us moving forward? Let’s start with data from Pink’s global online survey where 16,000 people from 105 countries shared their regrets with him and four broad types of regrets were identified.

Foundation Regrets: “If only I had done the work.”

These regrets stem from not prioritizing foundations of a stable life and examples may include financial stability or prioritizing health.

Boldness Regrets: “If only I had taken the chance.”

These regrets come from failing to take a chance and examples may include wishing you went to college or graduate school or changed careers. It also includes more personal regrets such as wishing you would have gone on an adventure or asked someone out on a date.

Moral Regrets: “If only I had done the right thing.”

These regrets occur when we betray our own moral code and examples include unfaithfulness, cutting corners, or not following through on commitments.

Connection Regrets: “If only I’d reached out.”

These regrets involve broken or neglected relationships, or not sharing real feelings. These are the most common regrets.

The Practice: Identifying Regrets

Can you pick one small thing that you regret or wish you’d done differently in your life? Nothing big, nothing that brings up strong emotions; just something easy to practice with. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Which type of regret does this fall into?
• If I knew then what I know now, would I do this again?

Determining the type of regret you have teaches you what you value. If your regret is letting a friendship lapse, then you may value connection in this point in your life. If your regret is a foundational regret then you may value security at this point in your life. When you ask yourself if you’d make the same decision now, knowing what you know, can you offer yourself compassion? What if someone you loved shared this regret with you? What would you say to them? You can even say to yourself “You’ve grown a lot since you made that decision, look at what you’ve learned.”

The Practice: Making a Change

Now that you’ve tied a regret to a value, and hopefully provided yourself some self-compassion, ask yourself, How can I use this information to better my current life? Do you want to reconnect with a friend or family member? Email, text, or call that person, I bet they will be happy to reconnect and even if they aren’t then you know YOU tried and can find peace in that.

Catching up on foundational work? It’s never too late to change! Making positive health changes, strengthening finances, or moving someplace new can be reframed as positive challenges and the smallest of change can bring a healthy dose of self-esteem and hope for the future.

This is just a tiny offering of Daniel Pink’s work on regret. If this topic interests you and you’d like more information, you can find him on all social platforms.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What type of regrets do you have? What are they based on? Have you found ways to make some changes to your mindset?

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If you asked most women over 60 to describe how they feel, somewhere in the answer – underneath the gratitude and the carefully maintained perspective – you would find some version of the word tired.

Not sick-tired. Not age-tired. Something harder to name than either of those things.

I know this tiredness personally. I practiced criminal defense law for over three decades, raised children through genuinely difficult seasons, survived a divorce after a long marriage, and spent years being the person my family called when anything went wrong. I was capable and competent and chronically, quietly exhausted in a way I couldn’t quite explain.

It wasn’t until I remarried last year and finally had enough stillness to look honestly at my life that I understood what had been happening.

I had spent decades carrying things that didn’t belong to me.

The Exhaustion Nobody Names

There is a specific kind of depletion that comes from chronic emotional over-responsibility – from being the person who absorbs everyone else’s anxiety, manages everyone else’s crises, and holds the emotional weather of an entire family system on her shoulders.

Researchers call it emotional labor. Therapists call it over-functioning. Most women over 60 just call it their life.

We became this way for understandable reasons. Many of us grew up watching our own mothers disappear into everyone else’s needs and call it love. We were rewarded throughout our lives for being capable and selfless and endlessly available. We built identities around being needed – and when you’ve spent 40 years being the strong one, it becomes genuinely difficult to imagine what life looks like if you stop.

But here’s what I want you to consider: the exhaustion you’re feeling may not be about getting older. It may be about carrying a weight that has been accumulating for decades – and that you have more power to put down than you currently believe.

When Love Becomes a Burden

For women in our generation especially, the line between loving someone and making yourself responsible for them can become dangerously blurred.

We love our adult children – and we find ourselves managing their finances, their emotions, their relationships, their decisions. We love our partners – and we find ourselves monitoring their moods, smoothing their conflicts, absorbing their stress as though it were our own. We love our families – and we find ourselves at the center of every crisis, every holiday, every moment of tension that needs to be resolved.

And somewhere along the way, love stopped feeling like love. It started feeling like a job we never applied for and can’t figure out how to leave.

The truth – and I say this as someone who had to learn it the hard way – is that genuine love does not require self-erasure. You can love your adult children without managing their lives. You can care for the people around you without absorbing their emotional chaos. You can remain connected and present and deeply loving while also maintaining a self that is recognizably, unapologetically yours.

The Second Act Requires a Different Kind of Strength

Women over 60 are not winding down. The research on this is increasingly clear – our 60s and 70s can be among the most purposeful, creative, and meaningful decades of our lives, if we allow them to be.

But that second act requires something most of us were never taught: the ability to consciously choose what we carry and what we put down.

Not out of selfishness. Not out of indifference to the people we love. But out of the hard-won recognition that we cannot pour from an empty vessel – and that the people in our lives are ultimately better served by a woman who has learned to take care of herself than by a woman who has slowly, quietly disappeared.

You have more years ahead of you than you may currently believe. The question worth sitting with is what you want to do with them – and what you might need to put down in order to live them fully.

Also read, Reclaiming Yourself After a Lifetime of Being Everything for Everyone Else.

Let’s Discuss:

What’s one thing you’ve been carrying for years that you’re beginning to wonder if it was ever really yours? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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What do stereotypes say about young adults born between 1997 and 2012? What valuable role can grandparents play? To set aside judgment and open up the conversation, they have a key advantage: perspective. They know, for example, that every new generation has, in its own way, been viewed with suspicion by the one that came before it. It’s an age-old generational reflex: change is unsettling before it is understood. So what are these stereotypes, and how can we, today’s grandmothers, help break them down?

Too Fragile

Often described as hypersensitive, unable to handle criticism, or overly focused on mental health, this generation talks about realities that previous generations have often kept silenced.

What this might hide: Talking about anxiety, burnout, or personal limits may indicate a desire to stop normalizing silent suffering.

How grandmothers can help:

By not downplaying what the young person is expressing and by acknowledging that we may simply have been more silent than they are on these issues. Grandmothers can embrace vulnerability because if we dare to show it, it’s a step toward finding a solution.

Lazy Generation

They are accused of not wanting to work, of refusing to make an effort, or of lacking stamina.

What this might hide: many do not reject work, but rather exhaustion, toxic environments, and the idea that a person’s worth is measured solely by their productivity. Recent data shows that younger generations are looking to balance money, purpose, learning, and well-being at work.

How grandmothers can help:

First, we can replace phrases that imply “we used to work harder” with “What makes you want to give your all?” And in conversations with other adults, point out that wanting a balanced life isn’t the same as lacking ambition.

Smartphone Addicts

They’re supposedly incapable of living without screens, without social media, without seeking validation online.

What this might hide: every aspect of their lives has developed in a digital world. Aside from their negative effects, these technologies help them stay connected, learn, create, advocate, or find communities.

How grandmothers can help:

Rather than reducing phone use to an addiction, take an interest in how they use it: “Who do you follow online?” “What do you create?” And if the young person is aware of what their grandmother does online, it will also be easier to talk about the downsides or dangers.

Lack of Respect for Authority

Young people are often criticized for asking too many questions, not obeying automatically, or challenging established ways of doing things.

What this might hide: they have grown up in a world where many individuals and institutions have lost their credibility, and they also favor an horizontal management structure where everyone pitches in to find solutions. The hierarchical model does not align with their values of collaboration and autonomy. Arrogance is unacceptable, but demands for consistency, transparency, and fairness are entirely valid.

How grandmothers can help:

Help them distinguish between disrespect and critical thinking when necessary. A young person who asks “Why?” isn’t necessarily being rude. Sometimes they’re trying to understand before agreeing. However, tone makes all the difference, and it’s good to lead by example.

Impatience and High Expectations

Often portrayed as impatient and demanding, this generation has grown up in a world of instant gratification.

What this might hide: two very different things: instant gratification in various forms has always been part of their lives (though now all generations are becoming increasingly impatient) and… these young people are reaching adulthood in a costly, unstable, and anxiety-inducing environment, so their sense of urgency may stem from the feeling that the future is fragile.

How grandmothers can help:

They can put these difficulties into perspective. Grandparents know that, throughout history, certain periods have been just as destabilizing and anxiety-inducing as today, but they understand young people’s anxiety because they, too, are affected by the rapid transformation of today’s economic, social, and technological conditions. Openness is key here; we can ask them to explain what’s most challenging for them, while making it clear that we understand their world as young adults is very different from the one we experienced.

No Longer Know How to Communicate

People say Gen Z no longer know how to talk to others and that they prefer texting to real conversations.

What this might hide: they communicate differently. They switch between different forms of expression: text, images, humor, memes, videos, short messages, and online chats. It’s sometimes less rich, but sometimes not at all – it’s just a different code.

How grandmothers can help:

By creating opportunities for real conversation: walks, coffee, car rides, and shared activities can sometimes spark very meaningful conversations.

Self-Centered

They are accused of narcissism, individualism, and an obsession with identity.

What this might hide: Many young people are trying to figure out who they are in a world that is highly visible, highly competitive, and highly uncertain. Their search for identity can be interpreted as self-centeredness, when in fact it is often an attempt to find their place in the world.

How grandmothers can help:

By offering a less hurried, less performance-oriented perspective. They can remind young people that they have the right to try, to make mistakes, and not to have a clearly defined identity by the age of 20.

In short, challenging stereotypes about Gen Z doesn’t mean pretending that young people are perfect. It means refusing to pigeonhole them before listening to them.

Let’s Have a Conversation :

Do your adult grandchildren usually talk to you? Do you think grandmothers can counter pervasive myths by sharing firsthand observations about their adult grandchildren? What are the differences between being an ally and being a mentor to your grandchildren?

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