As a woman over 60, you have already lived a long life. You have likely fulfilled many of your practical goals. You may have married, raised children and had a satisfying career.

You have always put others first and, now that you are older, you may want a change of pace. You want to spend time on yourself – to visit with friends, travel the world, sleep in, read or simply watch television.

Is Your Life Everything that You Want It to Be?

But after a while, some of you may feel that something is missing. As you read books, you may think, “I could have written that.” As you go to an art show, you may wonder, “What if I tried to paint that?”

A wave of regret my wash over you. You wish you had painted when you were younger. You wish you had written a book or learned to play a musical instrument while there was still time. You have always felt that you had some artistic talent – you remember that as a child you liked to draw, or write stories, or perform in neighbourhood plays.

You may be longing to let these artistic talents flourish again, but you are afraid that you may have left it too late. You feel that you are too old and do not have the ability or energy to do it now. This is not true!

Life After 60 is the Perfect Time to Follow Your Passions

People have always created works of art and innovative projects well into old age. Many of them made their first attempts when they were well into their 60s, 70s and beyond. We have marveled at the works of elder pioneers like Grandma Moses and Millard Kaufman.

Their work reflects a warehouse of knowledge gained over a lifetime of learning and experience. This knowledge, researchers are finding, provides fertile ground for creativity. But the story does not end there.

We, as women over 60, all have a rich store of accumulated life experience. But now we know we have something more. Thanks to recent research, we know that our brains have the ability to form new neural pathways, and learn new skills up to a very old age.

Do You Know How Amazing the Aging Brain is?

Neuroscientists have now accepted that the brain has a quality referred to as “plasticity,” the quality that allows you to learn a language, a musical instrument, or take up an entirely new endeavor, no matter what your stage in life might be.

Shelley H. Carson, (Harvard University), has studied creativity and the aging brain. She says:

“These changes in the aging brain may make it ideally suited to accomplish work in a number of creative domains. So instead of promoting retirement at age 65, perhaps we as a society should be promoting transition at age 65: transition into a creative field where our growing resource of individuals with aging brains can preserve their wisdom in culturally-valued works of art, music or writing.”

Dr. David Galenson, who has conducted studies on creativity for the National Bureau of Economics, concludes:

“Recent research has shown that all the arts have had important practitioners of two different types – conceptual innovators who make their greatest contributions early in their careers, and experimental innovators who produce their greatest work later in their lives.”

These discoveries have dramatic implications for us – we realize now that creativity is not exclusively the domain of the young. We know that women over 60, who are beginning to explore an art form, can depend on many years of creativity.

We know that our talents and abilities are still there, inside us, just waiting to be awakened. Whether you are 60, 70, 80, or even 90, you can use your brain in such a way that this period in your life becomes your happiest and most productive.

By reawakening your creativity, you will capture the natural enthusiasm, energy, and wonder of youth. You will have bypassed the belief that you are too old—you will have taken the quantum leap over the laborious steps of rational thought, and into creativity.

Is it Possible to Find Your Creativity After 60?

Of course it is! It is still there, just as it always was. The difference is that, this time, it is enhanced by life experience—millions of rich, valuable impressions that you can draw on while you are expressing the medium you want to explore.

What Should You Try First?

Well, anything, actually! You don’t have to be the next Michelangelo, or Robert Frost. You just have to do something that stimulates your creative brain. Once you start, there can be no looking back.

Once you find your artistic and creative niche, you will wake up each morning, champing at the bit, anxious to get going. Nothing is beyond the realm of possibility. Nothing is impossible.

Here are some ideas:

• Write a piece of music
• Take a course in quilting
• Learn about medicinal herbs
• Learn a musical instrument
• Do something new for your health – learn yoga or tai chi
• Bake the perfect cake and ice it creatively
• Learn carpentry and build a birdhouse
• Learn the names of hundreds of perennials and start growing them
• Write a poem or a story about your childhood
• Take a class in dramatic performance or water colour

Opening your mind to the creative process will open new channels. It will wake you up and give your life new meaning. Once you have fulfilled an idea, you will be inspired to try another one. You are now on a creative path that will take you into new worlds of experience!

Combining knowledge into novel and original ideas is what the creativity is all about. Women over 60 have both: knowledge and the capacity for original thought. Who knows what can happen next?

“Aging is not lost youth but a new stage of opportunity and strength.” Betty Friedan

Do you find yourself doodling, or sketching, while watching television? Do you daydream, creating scenarios of dramatic situations in your mind? What are your creative passions? Please join the conversation.

When Chrissy Teigen shares her favorite makeup or skincare products, we listen. So when she took to Instagram Live to share all the must-have beauty essentials she packs for trips. In a towel and a face mask, Teigen showed her favorite pimple stickers, the Zitsticka Killa that are actually now available on Amazon. Chances are, you use pimple patches too and you might want to get your hands on these.

After sharing everything in her makeup bag, Teigen got down to skincare and held up Zitsticka Killa. “They are so awesome,” she said. “They’re these little patches with these little, not needles, but pokeys and you put them into your pimple and leave it on all day or whatever you want and it dries out your pimpke and I love it.”

Those “pokeys” are actually 24 microneedles that dissolve into the pimple. Killa is different from regular hydrocolloid patches in that there are also acne-fighting ingredients infused within. In this case, there’s salicylic acid to kill bacteria, niacinamide to reduce inflammation and hyaluronic acid to retain moisture.

Our mission at STYLECASTER is to bring style to the people, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.

Zitsticka.

Buy: Zitsticka Killa $29

Zitsticka Killa is for those new, up-and-coming zits that haven’t yet come to the service. A flat hydrocolloid patch will work well for those. Each Killa box comes with eight microneedle Killa patches and eight priming Cleana swabs used to prep the zit before patch application. You won’t get that satisfying white gunk in the patch, but instead you’ll be shocked by how well these shrink a swollen, red spot. You might need to use another one the next night to keep the pimple from ever becoming mature in the first place.

Dolores Catania’s Dress on the Yacht

Real Housewives of New Jersey Season 11 Episode 10 Fashion

ICYMI when BBH’s Faryn posted it back in September, Dolores Catania’s floral off the shoulder dress on the yacht on tonight’s #RHONJ had to be mentioned again.  The Jersey Housewife looks absolutely stunning in the piece providing the perfect spring inspo for the rest of us. And if you missed this post the first time, the sold out status might just be enough to convince you to subscribe to our mailing list at the bottom of this page and get all of the news on her dresses hot off the presses.

The Realest Housewife,

Big Blonde Hair

Click Here to See her Rebecca Taylor Dress

Click Here To Shop her Carmen Sol Tote

Click Here to See her Alexandre Birman Wedges

Photos & Info: @DoloresCatania

Originally posted at: Dolores Catania’s Dress on the Yacht

In a book review about good taste, Jeffrey Felner, the witty and often acerbic arbiter of fashion, suggested that, yes, you can learn tricks to develop your personal style, but taste isn’t something you can learn; you’re either born with it or you’re not.

That certainly puts a lot of us out of the running and, frankly, I take exception to this statement. Dig into the DNA of the most refined and elegantly turned out among us and you’ll discover the grunters and grovelers not that far down the family tree.

So the question arises: how did we Neanderthals evolve into taste makers?

More to the Point, What Is Taste?

It’s almost as hard to define taste as it is to define jazz, and actually they have something in common. People with good taste have imbibed – either through cultural osmosis or actual study – the fundamentals of good design and color harmony. Then they improvise on those fundamentals in a way that uniquely expresses who they are.

So, in that sense, Mr. Felner is right. You can teach principles of design but they have to be translated by a savvy individual.

In the non-fashion sense, good taste is synonymous with good behavior and modesty, two things that often spill over into one’s attire. There’s also unpretentious thoughtfulness in those we consider to have good taste.

Also, they radiate an aura of calm. You won’t find them rushing around like bunnies in heat. (When asked the secret to his longevity, Mel Brooks’ Thousand-Year-Old Man explains, “I never ran for a bus.”) It’s also a quality you’ll see in many chic French women: they appear as though they have all the time in the world.

Taste vs. Trend

In the fashion sense, someone with good taste will give a nod to the changing times, but their attire is rarely uber trendy. That means they’ll wear a few high quality and currently fashionable items, and often with a somewhat classical cut, repeatedly rather than a carousel of cheaper ones that get recycled after one season.

It’s been suggested that good taste is the natural result of a bump up in status and income. If that were so, every celebrity would be a shining example of taste.

Besides, dressing tastefully has a different meaning among the echelons of old money where the desire to not stand out has been inbred over generations, most likely so as to not upset the hungry masses. But they also understand that one’s attire should not be so subtle that one would simply disappear into the velvet curtains. That would smack of false pride, which goes against good taste.

Let It Be or Make It So?

Still, cracking the code of good taste isn’t too difficult. It leaves clues. For one thing: forethought. A tasteful outfit may appear casual, simple and effortless but it’s never sloppy. And it’s never wrinkled – unless you’re wearing linen, in which case you get a pass, since wrinkles are part of the linen pedigree. And speaking of fabric, natural fibers are considered more tasteful. (Polyester doesn’t scream “taste.”)

An absolute requirement for an outfit to be considered tasteful is good fit. Too big, too loose, too tight, too short, too long, too-too – all of these run counter to tastefulness.

That means: get a good tailor. It’s nearly impossible to find something off the rack that meets the fit requirement of the truly tasteful dresser.

Also, good taste shares something with good style in that it implies visual harmony. The colors of the garments – and the coloring of the wearer – harmonize with each other in “temperature” (warmth or coolness of tone) and value (range of light and/or darkness in the colors.) And then, there are the nitty gritty details. Patterns and prints, their scale, the size of a fabric’s weave and the textures of the fabrics flatter the person wearing them. And, the proportions of the pieces themselves make sense in terms of their size and their cut.

“I don’t mind bad taste. A little bad taste is like paprika. It’s no taste that I abhor.” Diana Vreeland

But let’s not get too hung up on the details here. Instead of making yourself crazy trying to get it all “just right” you can, with some of the guidelines above, simply make it a lot better. Besides, sometimes good style trumps good taste.

As with Mrs. Vreeland, a real tastemaker can be someone who appreciates what makes her unique, including her so-called figure “faults,” unusual features or atypical proportions. She is supremely comfortable in her own skin and it shows in how she carries herself. In that way, she creates her own version of taste, and by repeating that she establishes a personal signature, which is, after all, the goal… and a pretty noble one at that.

Do you think that fashion taste can be learned? Or, is it something that you are “born with?” On the other hand, should you dress with taste? Do you think good fashion taste is just another thing that tries to define who we should be? Please join the conversation.