Author: Admin01

When tempers are flaring and hearts start to burn,
It’s time for the people of Earth to return.
To reason and kindness, to listening hearts,
To knowing that healing is how peace will start.

In India’s villages, France’s proud streets.
And Israel’s markets where sorrows repeat.
To Pakistan’s valleys where heartache runs deep,
Our neighbors need courage to wake from their sleep.

Across wider oceans, new voices arise,
In the States, England’s, and Canada’s gray skies.
In Germany’s halls where the old echoes hum,
Can trust be rebuilt, and our better selves come?

We’ve shouted and blamed and drawn battle lines,
We’ve traded our truth for political signs.
But truth isn’t owned by red, green, orange, or blue,
It’s living inside me, and inside of you.

Each country’s been shaken, each family has known,
The pain of division that cuts to the bone.
But bridges can form where compassion is laid,
And anger dissolves when forgiveness is made.

We don’t need agreement on every belief,
To give our neighbors a sense of relief.
For mercy is stronger than fury or pride,
And love is the banner that won’t be denied.

Let voices grow softer, let tempers unwind,
As empathy returns to unlock our minds.
All nations divided will crumble apart,
Until we recall that we share but one heart.

So breathe, fellow humans, and cease with the harm,
Our healing begins when we choose to stay calm.
Not silence or weakness, but courage refined,
To speak with compassion and open your mind.

When history looks back on this most troubled age,
May it read that we learned to turn down our rage.
Kindness returned as a long-absent psalm,

So peace then did blossom — in Our Time of Calm.

Image created via AI.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What types of events shake your world? How do you find your way back to peace and calm?

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Originally posted at: Lisa Barlow’s White Lace Inset Button Down Shirt

For generations, makeup has been viewed as a woman’s essential accessory – a signal of femininity, youth, and social acceptability. But today, a powerful shift is taking place, especially among women 60 and older: a growing number are choosing to step forward with clean, bare skin, embracing natural beauty and redefining what confidence looks like. This modern movement toward makeup-free living is not a rejection of beauty, but a reclamation of it.

As a licensed skin care professional and makeup artist, I have spent years observing how women relate to their skin. My clients would often ask me to design skincare protocols to “fix” imperfections – fine lines, hyperpigmentation, texture changes, uneven tone – and then follow up by wanting makeup application lessons to conceal the very features that make their skin unique. But over the last several years, I’ve witnessed a gentle revolution. More mature women are boldly setting aside foundation, powders, and pigments, choosing instead to honor the natural radiance of their skin.

And for many, this choice is not only about appearance – it is about comfort, identity, sustainability, and the freedom to live authentically.

A Brief Look Back: Makeup’s Long and Colorful Evolution

To appreciate this shift, it helps to understand the history of cosmetics. Makeup has played many symbolic and cultural roles throughout time.

Nearly 6,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians laid the foundation for what we now recognize as cosmetics. Makeup was not merely decorative; it signified status, spiritual protection, and connection to the gods. The green malachite eye shadow symbolized Horus and Re. Kohl was used by men and women alike as early as 4000 BCE, both for beauty and for eye health. Rouge, skin-lightening powders, and richly pigmented mineral cosmetics were all part of daily life among the elite. Across ancient civilizations, makeup was closely tied to culture, religion, and social rank.

Fast-forward to 18th-century America, when both upper-class men and women wore visible makeup. But societal norms shifted dramatically after the American Revolution. “Painted” cosmetics gradually fell out of favor, becoming associated with theatricality rather than respectability.

Now, centuries later, beauty standards are shifting once again – this time toward simplicity, authenticity, and age inclusivity.

Clean Skin as the New Luxury

One of today’s most influential beauty movements is the no-makeup trend, and women 60+ are at the heart of it. While younger consumers may treat “no-makeup makeup” as a novelty aesthetic, mature women are embracing the true version of it: clean, healthy, beautifully cared-for skin without cosmetic enhancement.

Hollywood women like Pamela Anderson and Halle Berry have made headlines for appearing bare-faced at red carpet events – but millions of everyday women are doing the same in their own lives. They are allowing their wardrobes, jewelry, confidence, and natural glow to take center stage rather than relying on cosmetics.

This shift also aligns with a growing desire for sustainability. Beauty brands are being challenged to rethink how they formulate foundations, lipsticks, concealers, and powders, as more consumers embrace minimalism and wellness-driven choices. Women in their 60s and beyond, who often prioritize skincare over makeup, are leading the movement with grace.

Why Women 60+ Are Opting Out of Makeup

1. Skin Freedom

With age comes wisdom – and a deeper understanding of what feels good. Many women discover that makeup no longer enhances their skin the way it once did. Instead of hiding texture or lines, embracing clean skin highlights natural elegance and life experience.

2. Skincare vs Cover-Up

Women today prefer investing in products that nourish the skin rather than conceal it. Serums, moisturizers, hydrating mists, and treatments replace layers of foundation and powder.

3. No More Drama

Makeup can be time-consuming, messy, and often unnecessary. Mature women are choosing to simplify their routines. Less stress, more freedom.

4. Comfort and Skin Barrier Health

As skin becomes drier and thinner with age, heavy makeup may cause irritation. Clean skin feels lighter, healthier, and more breathable.

5. Confidence in Authenticity

Perhaps the most powerful reason is that women are embracing the beauty of real faces, real stories, and real self-acceptance.

A Professional’s Perspective on the Trend

As both a skincare practitioner and makeup artist, I see this trend as a beautiful evolution – one that values health and individuality. Makeup should never be a mask; it should be a choice. And for many women, that choice is now none at all.

Women 60+ who choose natural beauty are modeling a refreshing truth: aging is not something to correct or camouflage – it’s something to honor.

I welcome any of the women from Sixty and Me the opportunities to communicate with our Clinical Skincare Experts to answer any questions that they may have about their skin care needs. My team will be more than happy to provide expert advice regarding:

• Skincare rituals for mature, makeup-free skin.
• Treatments to enhance natural radiance.
• Techniques for minimal or no-makeup looks.
• Understanding skin changes in the 60+ population.

This is a powerful, exciting topic – and one that deserves thoughtful conversation and celebration.

Let’s Discuss:

What does makeup mean to you? What does going no-makeup mean to you? Do you take better care of your skin when you go no-makeup?

With a perspective on life that comes from time and experience, one of the things that I now truly believe is that luck and serendipity have had a far greater role in how my life has unfolded than I ever imagined when I was a sure-footed, logical 20-something.

The biggest decisions – who we love, where we live, the work we end up doing – often look planned only in hindsight. In reality, they were usually a matter of right time, right place, right person.

That’s not to say planning has no place. It does. But the older I get, the more convinced I am that life runs on two vibrations at once.

One gets things done.

One gets lucky.

A mode for efficiency, lists and predictability and a mode for wandering, recognising and discovering.

If you think about it, you already know these two modes. You’ve lived them. You’ve relied on both. All I’m doing here is giving language to something your intuition has understood for years.

And over the past 3 years in particular, as I’ve wrestled with how to help adults truly understand the French they’re learning – to make it lived and felt rather than memorised – I’ve realised these two modes explain far more about adult learning than any textbook ever has.

Let me put names to them.

Let’s call them Walmart mode and TJ Maxx mode.

The Two Modes We All Know

Walmart mode is the linear part of us.

You know what you want, you go in and get it. You tick things off. Clear, calm, efficient. There’s nothing wrong with that mode – we depend on it daily.

TJ Maxx mode, though, is entirely different.

It’s when you arrive with a feeling rather than a list. You’re not looking for something. You’re looking for something right. A jacket you didn’t know would suit you; a bowl that feels like it has history; a French hand cream you thought had disappeared in 1998.

This is the treasure-hunter mode. The mode that says, stay open – today might be the day something wonderful turns up. It’s the same mode that brings us most of our biggest wins in life.

Poker vs Chess: Why Discovery Feels Like Alchemy

A behavioural scientist once told me that life is played in two games: chess and poker.

Chess rewards logic, planning and step-by-step progress. Poker rewards possibility, instinct, risk and the willingness to be surprised.

Walmart mode is chess. TJ Maxx mode is poker.

And this is why serendipity matters.

A perfectly played game of chess earns you one point. But one lucky hand in poker can change the whole night.

Learning works the same way – a single unexpected discovery can propel you into another league, sometimes much further than weeks of steady effort.

The more I teach adults in midlife, the more convinced I become that most breakthroughs aren’t incremental. They arrive like a jackpot. You work steadily… steadily… steadily… and then suddenly everything clicks.

My Friend’s Chalet in the French Alps

Recently, a friend furnished her chalet in the French Alps almost entirely with finds from TJ Maxx. Not because she needed to save money – she didn’t – but because every object came with a story.

A set of glasses discovered by accident. The matching set found months later in a store two hundred miles away.

A throw that felt like it had travelled continents. She never once remarked on the price. What she loved – what she showed off – was the serendipity. The chase. The luck. The thrill of having recognised treasure when it appeared.

That chalet was beautiful, yes. But what made it sing was the emotional electricity of discovery. And that, I’ve found, is exactly what adults bring to their learning when they’re given permission to operate in both modes: the certainty of structure and the thrill of serendipity.

Why This Matters for Real Learning

Midlife learning doesn’t thrive under pressure or perfectionism. It thrives under permission.

Permission to take a straight line and permission to wander.

Permission to follow a plan and permission to chase a spark.

Permission to spend ten minutes on something tiny and forty minutes lost in something wonderful.

This is where the deepest understanding is built – the kind that stays, the kind you can use, the kind that becomes part of who you are.

And for me, this realisation was a complete breakthrough. It shifted everything about how I taught French. It solved a problem I had been circling for years. And – much like the best finds in TJ Maxx – it arrived in the most unexpected way.

The Gold Find I Didn’t Expect

When I finally accepted that adults learn best when they have both order and serendipity, something clicked.

I stopped thinking in terms of lessons and tasks and started thinking in terms of places. Places you can move through; places where structure lives alongside chance.

So I built something surprising – not a syllabus, not an app menu, but a map.

A simple, elegant map of a virtual, fictional French town that shows you how and what you can learn but also leaves space for wandering and discovery.

I didn’t plan it as a big idea. But I am so pleased to see my students react exactly the way I do when I turn a corner in TJ Maxx and spot something perfect I didn’t know I was looking for.

That sharp, delighted, “Oh! …this.”

And that was the moment I realised: sometimes the thing that unlocks real fluency is the thing you never would have asked for because you didn’t know it existed.

Just like the treasures hiding at the back of the store.

Closing Thoughts

So, here’s what I’d love you to take from all this: learning in midlife is not about grinding through a plan. It’s about giving yourself permission to move in both modes.

The steady mode.

And the serendipity mode.

Chess and poker.

Walmart and TJ Maxx.

I believe real understanding – the kind that lasts, the kind that surprises you, the kind that lets you express yourself with ease and pleasure – isn’t a straight line.

It’s a collection of treasures you found because you were curious enough to look.

In midlife, we recognise ourselves most clearly in the things we choose, not the things we’re told. And that, I think, is the magic of this chapter of life. We finally understand that wandering doesn’t take us off the path.

Often, it is the path.

And if all of this has stirred something in you – a curiosity to see how these two modes might reshape your own learning – you’re warmly invited to come and have a wander around The French Room.

But before you go, let me leave you with

A Question:

What treasure in your life did you only discover because you wandered?