Month: January 2026

When Mom was alive, there was a brief time when she had to leave her independent living community for a skilled nursing facility for rehab. I did not know then that the person sleeping three feet away could have significantly impacted her health outcomes.

The idea that your roommate could affect how long you live may sound dramatic – but a new study suggests it’s real. Research highlighted by McKnight’s Long-Term Care News found that more thoughtful roommate selection in nursing homes could reduce short-term mortality by more than 5%. Economists analyzed 2.6 million nursing home stays and discovered compatibility matters profoundly, particularly concerning cognitive status. While facilities worldwide increasingly move toward private rooms – a trend accelerated by COVID-19, many older adults still face shared accommodations.

This raises a question that rarely gets enough attention: What should we consider when a move into senior living involves sharing a room with a stranger?

This issue doesn’t just apply to large nursing homes in the U.S. It’s equally relevant in assisted living, memory care, and the growing number of small, home-like residences with 9–10 residents found across Europe, Canada, Australia, and parts of Asia. Different systems, same human reality.

Why Roommates Matter So Much

Roommates influence daily rhythms: sleep, noise, light, visitors, even emotional tone. For older adults – especially those who are frail, cognitively impaired, or newly relocated – these factors can compound stress. Stress affects appetite, immunity, mobility, and mood. Over time, those effects can become medical.

The study’s takeaway is not that a “bad roommate” causes death, but that mismatched living arrangements amplify vulnerability. In contrast, compatibility can support stability, routine, and a sense of safety – all critical during the first 90 days after a move, when risk is highest.

Key Questions Every Consumer and Caregiver Should Ask

If you or someone you love may have an unknown roommate, ask these questions before signing anything:

How Are Roommates Matched?

Is it random, based on availability, or intentional? Facilities should consider sleep schedules, cognitive status, medical issues, mobility, hearing, and social preferences. If the answer is “we don’t really match,” that’s a red flag.

The research reveals an asymmetric relationship that challenges conventional wisdom about room assignments. Residents with dementia showed significantly lower mortality when paired with cognitively healthy roommates, benefiting from informal monitoring and behavioral support their roommates provide. However, cognitively healthy residents experienced no such benefit from dementia roommates and actually fared better in private rooms. Which seems logical, right?

What Happens If the Match Doesn’t Work?

What is your policy for changing roommate assignments if compatibility issues arise? How quickly can moves happen? Is there a trial period? Are room changes treated as routine – or as disruptions to avoid? Facilities that resist roommate changes may prioritize administrative convenience over resident wellbeing.

How Are Conflicts Identified?

Staff who know residents well will notice subtle signs: withdrawal, agitation, disrupted sleep. Ask how often staff check in and how concerns are escalated. In shared settings, particularly smaller group homes, what staff-to-resident ratios ensure adequate supervision? The research found effects were twice as large in understaffed facilities, suggesting roommate dynamics become especially critical where professional oversight is inadequate.

Can Families Be Involved?

In many countries, family input is considered optional rather than essential. It shouldn’t be. Families often know triggers, habits, and preferences that residents may not articulate.

What About Private Space?

Even in shared rooms or small homes, residents need control over something – lighting, curtains, headphones, or quiet hours. Ask what autonomy looks like day to day.

Small Homes Aren’t Automatically Safer

The rise of small, household-style senior living promises intimacy and personalization. But fewer residents doesn’t guarantee better matching. In fact, incompatibility can feel more intense in close quarters. Across Europe, where smaller care homes have become increasingly common, families have learned that intimate settings amplify both positive and negative interpersonal dynamics. What works beautifully can quickly become untenable if compatibility issues emerge.

Globally, regulation of these homes varies widely. In some countries, they operate outside traditional oversight. That makes proactive questioning even more important.

Your Rights and Advocacy Options

Regardless of location, remember that most care facilities depend on your satisfaction and payment. You have leverage. If initial room assignments prove problematic, document specific concerns – disrupted sleep, safety issues, emotional distress – and request changes in writing. In many jurisdictions, residents have legal rights to appropriate accommodations that protect their wellbeing.

The Private Room Alternative

When financially feasible, private rooms eliminate roommate-related risks entirely. Many countries now offer subsidies or tax benefits for private accommodations in recognition of both dignity and infection control benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted policy discussions worldwide about phasing out multi-bed rooms.

Moving Forward with Confidence

The roommate decision deserves the same careful consideration you’d give to selecting the facility itself. Tour at different times, observing how staff manage shared spaces. Ask current families about their experiences with room assignments. Trust your instincts – if a proposed roommate situation feels wrong, speak up immediately rather than hoping things improve.

A Broader Global Lesson

Around the world, aging systems are under pressure: staffing shortages, cost constraints, and growing demand. Roommate matching may sound like a “soft” issue – but this research reframes it as a public health concern.

Older adults are not just beds to be filled efficiently. They are people entering one of the most vulnerable transitions of their lives.

The lesson for consumers and caregivers is clear: where and with whom someone lives matters. Asking better questions about roommates isn’t being difficult – it’s being protective.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Have you ever lived with a roommate? Were you compatible? What do you think is the importance of roommates in senior living facilities?

The idea didn’t come from a design studio.

It came from my crooked stove.

I live in an old house – the kind with character, which is another way of saying nothing is quite level. One evening, I noticed my frying pan tilting slightly to one side. Oil pooled where it wasn’t supposed to. Food cooked unevenly.

At first, it was just annoying.

Then I noticed something else.

The food on the lower side cooked faster. The food on the higher side cooked slower. Same pan. Same burner. Different results.

That’s when the thought landed – not gently, but clearly:

Why Are All Frying Pans Flat If Heat Never Really Is?

I was standing there in gym shorts, trying to get dinner on the table without turning it into a production, when I realized the crooked stove had accidentally solved a problem I’d been fighting for years.

Chicken wants high heat.

Vegetables don’t.

Fat splatters everywhere.

Every frying pan assumes everything cooks the same way – and it doesn’t. So instead of fixing the stove, I started sketching the pan.

What if the pan was tilted by design? What if angle – not just material or size – determined how food cooked?

That crooked stove changed everything.

What began as a personal annoyance turned into the iLean-Pan – a sloped frying pan designed to create multiple heat zones in one pan, allowing food to cook at different speeds with less mess and less stress.

I didn’t set out to become an inventor.

I just wanted dinner to work.

So here are the lessons I learned from this whole ordeal.

1. If You Have an Idea – Act

Ideas don’t get better with time. They get quieter. We talk ourselves out of them. We say things like:

• Someone else probably already did this.
• I’m too old to start now.
• I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

But most real ideas don’t arrive fully formed. They show up as irritation. If something keeps bothering you, chances are it’s not just your problem.

When I started talking about my tilted pan idea, people said:

• “That happens to me all the time.”
• “I hate juggling multiple pans.”
• “I just want cooking to be easier.”

That’s when I realized something important. I didn’t solve a problem for the market. I solved a problem for myself – and the market recognized it.

You don’t need a perfect plan to begin. You need motion.

One sketch led to another. One conversation led to a prototype. One decision led to filing a patent.

None of it happened because I waited until I felt ready. It happened because I started.

2. Put Your Idea Out in the World

Acting didn’t mean quitting my life or suddenly knowing what I was doing. It meant taking one concrete step – and then another.

Those steps eventually led me to an appearance on season 21 of the Blox, not yet released. Filing a patent and learning all about metallurgy and welding and molds.

To a big step in January 2026 when I launched the iLean-Pan to the world, on Kickstarter, a platform designed specifically for ideas that don’t yet have a proven path. It’s where founders test real demand, not opinions.

If you’ve never backed a Kickstarter before, here’s what it really is: you’re not buying something off a shelf. You’re backing a founder. Kickstarter allows creators to produce small batches, test demand, and bring an idea to life with the support of early believers. Backers help fund the first production run and, in return, receive the product once it’s made. It’s not retail – it’s partnership. It’s how ideas move from “almost” to “real.”

Once I committed to that step, the real work began.

3. Be Prepared to Be Challenged

I coach and mentor entrepreneurs for both fun and for payment for services. And, actually, being the entrepreneur that created a physical prototype took more than I expected.

Let’s be honest about entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur isn’t someone with a logo and a laptop at a café. An entrepreneur is someone building something that doesn’t yet work – publicly.

By definition, entrepreneurship involves risk. No proven model. No guaranteed customers. No roadmap. Until revenue exists, you are a one-person band. And you have to decide how to get there.

I didn’t just invent a pan – I had to learn everything around it.

• I learned CAD (Computer Assisted Design) to communicate with engineers, designers and fabricators.
• I learned how to do 3-D printing to make my first model.
• I learned basic metallurgy so I could understand heat conductivity and how to slope the pan.
• I built my own website.
• I learned manufacturing language, packaging, patents, and crowdfunding economics.

None of this was familiar territory.

But here’s the advantage of being older: we’re no longer afraid of being beginners. We’ve already rebuilt our lives more than once. Learning something new doesn’t threaten who we are – it expands it.

Still, the challenges are real.

You’ll get conflicting advice. You’ll be questioned. You’ll be underestimated. And there will be long stretches where no one is clapping.

That’s often where people stop – not because they failed, but because encouragement didn’t arrive when expected.

4. The Toughest Lesson: The People You Expect to Help Usually Don’t

This was the hardest lesson for me. We assume the people closest to us – or the ones cheering the loudest – will be the ones who show up. They usually aren’t.

Some don’t understand what you’re building. Some are uncomfortable with change. Some simply can’t see you in a new role.

That doesn’t make them bad people. But it does mean you can’t build your courage around their approval. Support often comes from unexpected places – strangers, fellow entrepreneurs, people you meet halfway through the journey.

I learned to stop waiting for validation and start trusting momentum. Entrepreneurship later in life isn’t about proving anything. It’s about answering something inside that refuses to go quiet.

For me, that voice said: I’m not done yet.

Not with learning. Not with creating. Not with contributing.

Sometimes a crooked stove isn’t a flaw. It’s a clue.

What’s Next

If you’d like to follow this chapter – or support it – you can find the iLean-Pan on Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ilean-pan/sloped-frying-pan-tilted-by-design.

However this unfolds, I know one thing for certain: I’m still walking forward.

And at this stage of life, that feels like exactly the point.

Let’s Start a Conversation:

What causes have you supported? Do you think entrepreneurship in later life should be pursued? What inventions have made your life better?

If your mind were a compass, a curious thing,
Would it spin toward old stories with a sorrowful ring?
Would it point toward the past with a dramatic insist,
Crying, “Look what they did!” with a clenched fist?

For thoughts are the seeds that we scatter each day,
And life is the garden that grows what we say.
Whisper “I’m powerless,” then watch the vines creep,
Declare “I choose,” feel your courage wake from sleep.

Now pain wears a costume—oh, pain loves a role!
With a villain, a plot twist, a starring control.
“It happened to me!” says the mind with a cry,
And the world nods politely and lets the tears fly.

But hush now—lean in—here’s the radical view,
A truth with some sparkle and spiritual glue:
There are no helpless victims, abandoned or small,
There are choosers and thinkers and creators—that’s all.

Yes, things may occur that feel sharp or unfair,
But meaning is chosen—it’s breathed into air.
Power lives not in blame or in stories retold,
But in now, where your choices are fearless and bold.

In power is freedom, unbuttoned and bright,
In freedom is joy—soft and steady and light.
Joy doesn’t shout with a parade or a drum,
It slips in unnoticed when struggle goes numb.

Have you felt it, those moments that make zero sense?
Nothing improved, yet your heart felt immense.
No trophy was earned, no applause filled the room,
Yet happiness bloomed like a late afternoon.

That’s joy doing joy, without reason or proof,
When the mind steps aside and opens the roof.
It visits when judgment loosens its grip,
When you stop replaying that old sinking ship.

So what if today you chose one new thought?
Not wrestled or battled or tightly overwrought,
But gently replaced an old script that you knew:
“I’m free in this moment to choose something new.”

When anger comes knocking with a megaphone shout,
Just thank it for coming—and show it back out.
When blame sets the stage for its dramatic scene,
You bow and reply, “That’s no longer my dream.”

This isn’t denial or glittery cheer,
It’s spiritual backbone—it’s steering from here.
It’s bold. It’s empowering. Grounded. Awake.
It’s choosing your mind for your life’s own sake.

For life follows mind like a shadow at noon,
Or a dance partner matching your movement and tune.
Shift thought into truth, then courage and grace,
And watch how your world subtly changes its face.

Change your mind—not the past, not the who, not the why—
Just the lens through which all is allowed to pass by.
And life will respond, as it always has done,
“Keep changing the lens” and shine forth like the sun.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Would you say you’re a more positive or a more negative person? What affects your mindset the most? Have you tried swaying your thoughts in a direction you know will bear fruit in your life?

Let’s be honest: a whole lot of women of a certain age are out here living alone – and thriving. And why wouldn’t we be? Living solo comes with perks so delicious they should be bottled and sold at Sephora.

You control the thermostat like the benevolent queen you are.

You watch whatever you want on TV without negotiating with someone who thinks Storage Wars is “educational.”

You adopt a dog… or two… or three… because no one is there to say, “Do we really need another one?” (Yes. Yes, we do.)

And the best part? You can be social on your own terms. If you want to sip wine with friends, great. If you want to sit in silence with your dog and a bowl of popcorn, also great.

But recently, I stumbled across something that made me pause mid‑scroll and say, “Well now… this is genius.”

Welcome to Cumby, Texas – Home of the Bird’s Nest

Picture this: a tiny‑home retirement community designed exclusively for women ages 60–80. No drama. No judgment. No men wandering around, asking where the extra batteries are.

This magical place is called The Bird’s Nest, and it was founded by a woman named Robyn Yerian, who clearly woke up one day and said, “You know what? I’m going to do something fabulous.” And then she did.

She cashed out her $150,000 retirement fund, bought five acres of land, and created space for 14 tiny homes – each one its own cozy nest. The goal? A supportive, affordable community where women can live independently and have built‑in companionship when they want it.

And let me tell you… the response was nothing short of a stampede. A graceful, well‑moisturized, silver‑haired stampede.

Over 500 women applied for a handful of spots. Single, divorced, widowed – they flocked (pun absolutely intended) to this idea.

A Community Built on Connection, Not Chaos

Each woman has her own tiny home – her sanctuary, her space, her thermostat set to whatever temperature her heart desires. But at the center of the community sits a pavilion where the ladies gather for morning coffee, evening meals, laughter, and the kind of conversation that only happens when women feel safe and seen.

And when someone needs help? The community swoops in.

Doctor’s appointment? Someone’s driving.

Surgery recovery? Meals appear like magic.

Feeling lonely? Step outside – someone’s probably already waving you over.

It’s independence with a safety net. Solitude without isolation. A support system without the strings.

The Win‑Win We’ve All Been Waiting For

Yerian keeps the rent affordable, the vibe peaceful, and the drama nonexistent. In return, she earns passive income and gets to watch a community of women flourish on land she dreamed into existence.

Honestly, it’s brilliant.

It’s wholesome.

It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to stand up and clap in your living room.

Why We Need More Bird’s Nests

Women of a certain age deserve options – real options – for living joyfully, safely, and in community. Not everyone wants to live with family. Not everyone wants to remarry. Not everyone wants to age alone.

But everyone deserves a place where they can be themselves, feel supported, and laugh loudly without someone saying, “Can you keep it down?”

So yes, I love this idea.

Yes, I want more communities like this.

And yes, if someone wants to build one in Tennessee, I’ll happily bring the first casserole to the pavilion.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

Would you move to a women-only community? How about a tiny house community? Do you value your solitude without feeing lonely? What’s the biggest problem you’ve faced as a woman living solo?

Thinning hair is one of the most common (and misunderstood) changes women experience as they age. As a former model, licensed esthetician, and celebrity makeup artist, I’ve worked with women at every stage of life, and I can tell you this with confidence: thinning hair is completely normal and happens to almost everyone.

It doesn’t mean your hair is unhealthy. It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It simply means your hair, scalp, and hormones are changing, and your beauty routine needs to adapt.

In this tutorial, I’m sharing exactly how I have used hair powderon set, but my model this time ismy friend, Karyn. Together, we will cover her grey or discolored roots and instantly create the appearance of fuller hair.

Where Thinning Hair Shows Up First

Most women notice thinning in the same areas:

• Along the front hairline
• At the temples
• Down the part

As density changes, the scalp becomes more visible, especially in bright lighting. The darker your hair, the more noticeable the grey roots. The goal isn’t to hide this completely; it’s to reduce contrast so hair looks naturally fuller.

Why I Use Instant Coverage Hairline Powder

When I work with mature hair, I look for products that are:

• Matte (never shiny)
• Easy to control
• Buildable
• Forgiving

I’ve used several different hair powder brands, and I look for color and texture that blends seamlessly into the scalp and hair. The product I use in the video comes in six shades, making it suitable for brunettes, blondes, and women with silver or grey hair.

Pro tip for grey hair: Choose a soft grey or taupe shade that mimics natural shadow rather than trying to match hair color exactly.

Step-by-Step: How to Apply Hairline Powder

1. Start with clean, dry hair.
2. Use light tapping motions (never swipe).
3. Focus on the hairline and temples first.
4. Lightly soften the part.
5. Build gradually.

The moment scalp shine and contrast are reduced, hair appears thicker. On Karyn, I use the shade Ash Brown from PrimePrometics to darken her roots and add thickness.

Styling Techniques That Enhance Fullness

Hairline powder works best when paired with smart styling:

• Soft curls for movement
• Gentle backcombing at the crown
• A light mist of flexible hairspray

Pro tip: For the most part, backcomb before applying hairline powder for the most natural finish.

Why Hair and Makeup Should Work Together

As you watch the video, you’ll see as Karyn’s hair begins to look fuller, she is able to wear stronger eyeliner and lipstick. Because of this, I applied a black eyeliner on the top eyeline and blended it for a softer look.

Then I applied a soft taupe all over her lid called Afterglow, and a Mocha liner in her waterline to bring out the gold flecks in her eyes. On her lips, I applied a Nude Rose lip oil for both hydration and a shiny, luscious color.

“This Changed My Life”

Having thinning hair and constantly struggling with roots showing can feel demoralizing. Using simple products like hair powder can make a huge difference in feeling pretty and being able to wear stronger makeup looks. Karyn loved her new look, and actually felt like she could do this at home.

Add Your Thoughts:

Do you struggle with thinning hair and pronounced roots? What has worked for you and what do you think of hair powder?