How Not to “F-up” Your Face

Beauty fads come and go. Today, you can choose from Derma-planing, CO2 laser resurfacing, Mesotherapy injections, Exosomes and.....BOVINE COLOSTRUM? Do any of these work or are we just f-ing up our faces? Meet Valerie Monroe, former Beauty Director of “O”, “The Oprah Magazine” and author of the popular “Don’t F*ck Up Your Face” on Substack. In this episode, Monroe talks about what works, what doesn’t, and what it really means to age “beautifully,” including the most important, and affordable, beauty product you can put on your face. This is for anyone who’s looked in a mirror and asked “WTF?!”

Here's an NPR video on how to record and send your comments on the show. 
But at the end, instead of sending to NPR, email your comment to crowsfeetpodcast@yahoo.com. Or text to 404-786-3605.

Transcript

Nancy Franklin: “Micro-needling, derma-planning, retinoids, hypochlorous sprays, red light therapy, lasers. Are these beauty trends effing up our faces? And does anything work for aging skin?

Hi, I'm Nancy Franklin. My guest today has seen it all. Valerie Monroe was beauty director of Oh!

The Oprah Magazine for nearly 16 years. She now writes the popular sub-stack newsletter, How Not To Fuck Up Your Face. She's here today with practical advice.

I really wanted to get right to the meat of what you discussed, because I think it's important to all of our listeners. How are we fucking up our faces?”

Valerie Monroe: “I think, you know, the whole idea of our needing to stop the aging process is fundamentally, that's what's fucked up. It's not that our faces are fucked up. It's that we are constantly being fed this notion that as we age, we need to continue to start halting that process as soon as it starts.

And, in fact, the idea that we should start trying to halt the process becoming, we're thinking of it as happening earlier and earlier. So I just read a stat from the American Association of Plastic Surgeons that said that brow lifts are now more common among people. I can't remember the exact number.

It was something like, you know, 25 to 39 years old, which is astonishing. And I think the general trend is that women are considering facelifts earlier and earlier. And the whole idea that, as I say, that we can stop the aging process is just unhealthy and impossible.”

Nancy: And absurd. And why do you think it's happening to younger and younger people? Is this following a fad?

Val: Unfortunately, a lot of the pressure is coming from social media, which I keep saying is a fiction. I think most people and particularly younger people don't understand or haven't really integrated the fact that what we see as presentations on social media are for the most part, I would say, you know, 98% fiction. That is, what we see isn't real.

But we tend to incorporate it as something real. And so the impossible, you know, idealized versions of what women, and since we're talking about women in particular, are supposed to look like have become more and more constrained to a certain kind of look and a kind of perfection that's absolutely impossible. And I think the reason that especially younger people are more vulnerable to the idea that this perfection exists is because they're seeing it constantly on social media.

Nancy: Microneedling and dermaplaning, hyaluronic acid, I mean, some of the stuff I can't even pronounce, is there any actual benefit to any of it?”

Val: Yes, there are benefits to it. The problem is that often the benefits aren't visible to the naked eye. That's one thing.

And the other thing is that every potential treatment has a potentially different effect on every individual. So, I mean, with something like hyaluronic acid, I mean, that's a moisturizer, basically. Your skin produces it.

And if you add more in a moisturizer, you get kind of like a plumper feel to your skin temporarily. So, it mitigates dryness. Something like microneedling might be good for one person.

I mean, someone has the treatment, might like the results, and someone else who has the treatment might not see any results at all. It just depends on the condition of your skin, how much sun damage you have, how much your skin is aged. So, it's kind of impossible to say what treatment is going to benefit what person without a very considered examination of that person's skin.

Also, it's important to qualify what work means and what results are, right?”

Nancy: Right.

Val: What I see as the most difficult part, considering all these different kinds of treatments and products, is that everything is marketed with equal ferocity. You know, what might work for you, what might not work for you, what is a total scam, right? What might have some science behind it?

Nancy: Is this all about managing your expectations? I mean, the advertising seems to put everything up at a higher level, and we should probably manage our expectations a little differently for results.

Val: I was listening to another podcast recently, and two women were talking about complaints about their ageing faces. And one of them said that she had heard that a treatment, and I think it was SoftWave, and I think it's a heat-based treatment, that's supposed to tighten the skin. And she had heard something about it being really good, that it had great effects.

And so the person to the woman she was talking to said, well, that's great, that's what I'm going to get. And I just thought, well, this is just very sad. It's ridiculous, because number one, whether you can see any results from a treatment like soft wave depends on so many variables.

Your age, again, the condition of your skin, the technician who's giving you the treatment, what you're going for, what results you're looking for. And it's that kind of misinformation that's so easily passed on that I think is really a shame, because it leads to women having higher expectations about things that might not work at all for them or might work to such a small degree that they can't really see a difference, and yet they're very expensive and often require more than one treatment.

My guess is that a lot of these are temporary because we continue the aging process. So it occurs to me that a lot of this stuff is expensive and temporary. Is that a correct assumption?

Lasers, heat-based devices, retinoid, like a Retin-A, which is a cream that you put on your face, they can have results that are not only not temporary, but ongoing. So for example, with Retin-A, if you use Retin-A, if your skin can tolerate Retin-A, which has been proven to mitigate fine lines and wrinkles, also it helps cell turnover, so it keeps your complexion looking fresher, and helps to generate collagen and elastin, which also keep your face looking more youthful. Overtime, it works to do all of those things.

Lasers also, some lasers also help generate collagen and elastin, that they're not temporary results. I mean, you might get a temporary glow, kind of a pinkness from them, but mostly I would say for the products that you can buy over the counter that promise lifting, or brightening, or, you know, removal of, mitigation of dark spots and that kind of thing. Over the counter, those are mostly temporary.

You mostly get temporary results. So any cream that you buy that is promising that it's gonna give you a lifting effect, if it gives a lifting effect at all, it's only gonna last as long as the cream is on your face.

Nancy: So are men being affected by this as well? I mean, are they looking at the changes in aging and kind of starting to do the same sorts of things to their faces as well?

Val: I think there has been an increase in the number of men who are interested in dermatologic or plastic surgery treatments. But I think it's a different game for them, because as women, our currency has always been tied to our appearance. So value in our culture has this kind of unmitigated connection to how we look.

Whereas with men, it's not the same. So for example, women are considered over the hill when we lose our ability to reproduce, right? Around age 50, 51, mostly when most of us have gone through menopause, we notice that we become invisible, right?

What is that? I believe, I think it's because we've lost our reproductive value, and we're beginning to show the effects of aging. And for most of us, for our whole lives, appearance has been our currency.

So with men, it's very different. So I think there's less motivation for men to feel the need to kind of like support their value by maintaining a youthful appearance.”

Nancy: What about plastic surgery? Are there new techniques? I mean, again, I sort of, I don't know, I'm lost for why would we want plastic surgery? What do you think of plastic surgery? Does anything really stop the aging process?

Val: Well, no, as I said in the beginning, it's inevitable. And we can do many things that we believe will slow down the aging process, slow down how fast our faces appear to be aging. And by the way, the number one way to do that is to use consistently a sunscreen to protect your face from the sun, which I'm not sure about the statistic.

It's somewhere between 93 and 98 percent of the aging you see on your face is due to exposure to the sun. I always say, if you look at your tuchus and you see what that looks like, and then you look at your face, what your face might have looked like if you had kept your face out of the sun.

Nancy: Well, I know what I'll be doing tonight when I get dressed for bed.

“So my platform about plastic surgery is if it's something that's going to make you happy and you really need to be sure that you're doing it because you think it will make you happy, not that it will make your partner happy or the world's a better place. If you have plastic surgery, I say go for it because I think about consciousness, jumping to a metal level thing, but I think about consciousness and the magic of it, and the idea that at some point, often very young, we realize that we're here for only a short period of time, and at some point, and we don't know when, it's going to be lights out for all of us. Whatever you do that helps you get through the night, whatever you need to do that will help you really help you feel better about yourself, about this journey, I say, do it.

Midpoint Break: The Crow's Feet Life As We Age podcast team is planning something special for our Valentine's Day 2025 episode, and we want your advice and your experience at the heart of it. Whether we're talking about a relationship of one year or 50, we know that successful relationships aren't always a bed of roses. So, we'd like to hear from you.

What keeps you and your partner together? How do you compromise, strategize, or just plain improvise to keep your relationship in a good place? If you've got some practical advice or a relevant relationship story to share with us, there are two ways you can do it.

One is to record your answer on your iPhone and see the tips in the show notes for directions on exactly how to do that, and then send us the audio file. Or you can call our telephone line at 1-800-222-2216 and leave a message. Please do include your name, a contact phone number, or email address for you.

Aim for messages for no more than two minutes in length. That's toll free, 1-800-222-2216. The deadline to submit is Sunday, February 2nd.

And thanks for being part of the Crow's Feet community.

Nancy: Today, we're talking beauty and aging, with former O the Oprah Magazine beauty editor, Valerie Monroe.

Val: If you're never going to be happy with the way your face looks, because any manifestation of age on your face you think is unacceptable, that's going to be a problem. I frequently suggest to readers that they try mirror meditation.

I was just going to ask you about that.

I started it by accident when I was at the Oprah Magazine. They threw me a big party with advertisers to introduce me to the magazine when I started in 2001. Someone sent me a photo after the party of me in a face-to-face conversation in profile with the gorgeous model, Iman, you know she is.

Nancy: Yes.

Val: I looked at this photo, I remember clearly I was standing at my desk, I opened this envelope and I looked at this photo. And I looked at Iman and she looked like a magnificent hot house orchid in full bloom. And I looked like a tired parking lot daisy at the end of a long day.”

And I felt so disappointed and went over to the mirror in my office. And I stood in front of the mirror and I looked into my eyes. At this time, I was doing a lot of deep personal work, psychological work.

And I looked into my own eyes and after a bit, I saw the person who lived there. And I said to myself in the mirror, hi sweetie, and I was fine. And then I discovered that there's science behind doing that as an exercise.

So there's a psychologist, I think she's at Barnard, Tara Well. She's done studies that show that when you do mirror meditation on a regular basis, you have an increase of people who do this, have increased self-esteem, feel better about themselves generally. And it involves looking into the mirror, into your own eyes, until feelings start to come up, and allowing those feelings to arise, and then to confront them, accept them, whatever.

And I have to say, when I started to do it on purpose, I kind of felt like a jerk. It's very uncomfortable. You feel like you're putting the make on yourself, kind of.

It's very weird. But it works, because if you can learn to see your face without objectification, see your face the way you see the faces of the people you love, you're no longer scanning your face for flaws whenever you look in the mirror. And I think the reason we tend to do that is because from the moment we understand that it's ourselves we're looking at in the mirror, we women mostly, are taught to adjust that image to be pleasing to as we get older, to wear makeup, to have treatments, to the most invasive things like plastic surgery.

Nancy: Our hair, our weight, our makeup, our all of that. But it is that affirmation we have to tell ourselves, and that's become a mantra. I have to accept what age I am and be grateful for the things I can still do.

Val: I don't believe in the exercise of looking at yourself in the mirror and saying you're beautiful, you're everything, you don't need anything. I think that's kind of bullshit because there are times when we look in the mirror and we just don't feel that way, that if you can learn to see yourself for whatever you think is a seed of your defects, whatever they happen to be, you see yourself in a more positive way. I also have to say that because we're constantly bombarded by images of women that are unrealistically perfect, that also makes it difficult for us to look at ourselves, especially as we get older and naturally are moving farther away from that perfectionistic ideal.

It becomes more and more important to be able to see ourselves as people rather than as objects. And as a way to illustrate that, I wrote about going to see the Barbie movie. And the next morning, I got up and I looked in the mirror.

The first thing I did was I looked at the bathroom mirror. And instead of seeing this, instead of it being like a pleasant encounter, that it usually is, I said, I felt like I was looking at a dog. I was like, what the hell happened to my face last night while I was sleeping?

And then I realized I had just spent that night, the previous night, staring for two hours at this perfect face. And then I saw the movie about Golda Meir with Helen Mirren.

Nancy: Who looks great, by the way.

Val: she does. The next day when I looked at myself, I was like, well, I'm not doing too bad actually for 74, you know?

Nancy: Yeah. I mean, I've always admired Helen Mirren and Annette Benning and a couple of the other ones. And then I look at Martha Stewart, who was recently on the Sports Illustrated, you know, the swimsuit stuff. And I think, are we, what are we doing that that has to be either celebrated or even thought about in the first place?

What's the point of putting an 80-year-old woman in a bathing suit? Because it didn't necessarily make me feel better. I don't think this is inspiring or empowering.

Val: What we saw in that photograph, as much as Martha said, you know, it was hardly retouched. She asked for minimal retouching or something. Well, I mean, it's totally retouched.

I think, you know, probably in person, she looks great. I mean, I've never seen her in person. But the whole idea of putting an 80-year-old in a bathing suit on the cover of Sports Illustrated, I think, was to try to play the game that they're not ageist, that women of all ages can be appreciated in a bathing suit, which was total bullshit, because it has the opposite effect of making us all feel terrible about the way we look, because it's not realistic.

You know, as far as Martha goes, she, I think she is a brilliant, brilliant person.

Nancy: Yeah, brilliant marketing.

Val: It's not real. It's marketing.

Nancy: Right. And great genes.

Val: Yes, that helps. But, you know, she says she looks great because she, she has, she makes her own green juice in the morning, and she has a facial every month at some special salon she likes. But I've seen one very, very famous actress on television, on Charlie Rose, looking fabulous around the same age as Martha.

And then I saw her at an event and she looked completely different. She looked like desiccated poultry, but on television, she looked fabulous. So back to what I was saying earlier about what we see in social media or in media in general, on television, in the movies, it's a fiction.

I hated the idea that the message from the Sports Illustrated cover was that they were supposedly appreciating women of every age because of course, it had the opposite effect of making women at age feel terrible about the way they look because they don't look like this fake, idealized image.

Nancy: I am noticing now that a lot of the actresses who are turning 40s, 50s are starting to now talk about empowering aging and, you know, fighting against the stereotype. And I'm kind of wondering what your thoughts are on that, because I kind of feel like, hey, welcome to the club, girls. Too bad you didn't realize this in your 20s that you were going to get here.

Val: I think the reason they're talking about it is because somebody somewhere discovered a huge lucrative market in the menopause arena. What they're banking on, and I mean that literally, is the vulnerability of all of us who either are approaching menopause or post-menopausal. And they're now using, you know, their experiences or their aging as a way to create a new club for which the membership is very pricey.

The stuff that they're selling, most of them online, is baloney. The supplements, you know, maybe 98% of them don't do anything and could be potentially harmful. You don't know what's in them.

And that, again, I think is, it's shameful of these people who are, you know, marketing to this very vulnerable audience, these products that probably aren't going to do anything.

Nancy: So what would you say to women about beauty and aging?

Val: I think it's the same as it was when I first started at The Oprah Magazine. I was hired because I had no experience in the beauty arena. And Oprah didn't know that beauty advertising was the main financial support for women's magazines.

So she didn't want beauty editorial in the magazine originally because historically, the way beauty was treated in women's magazines was that the editorial would make women feel terrible about themselves month after month. So they would come back to the magazine to get themselves fixed, right? So she hated that idea.

The brilliant editor Amy Gross, who she hired to run the magazine, hated the idea. And they hired me to help try to figure out a way to approach beauty or talk about beauty to our millions and millions of readers. That was different.

And what we came up with was that we wanted to help women understand how the beauty industry worked. So why we would feel bad about ourselves, that helped support the beauty industry. And then what we could do once we understood how we were being manipulated to make ourselves feel more confident, less vulnerable, happier about how we feel about ourselves as we age, particularly about our appearance.

Nancy: What is the most important thing you learned about beauty?

Val: That from the time we can understand what are the expectations are in our beauty culture about our appearance, we begin to feel vulnerable and imperfect and not enough about ourselves. In a way, it keeps us in a position of yearning for something better. All the time searching for something better, a better product, a better treatment, that's going to make us feel like we're closer to the impossible culture, beauty culture ideals.

One of the ways that we can mitigate that is to learn to see our faces as people, as the people we are, rather than as objects to be decorated or manipulated in a certain way. And I think it's really important to understand that the yearning that we feel is the result of manipulation. It's not natural.

And if we can learn to see ourselves without objectification, we can also appreciate the way we look as we get older. I think I said somewhere, show me a woman, you know, who says she loves the way her body, her face and body look as she's aging. And I'll show you the bag of magic mushrooms she just ate.

Because we don't get more attractive as we get older. We're organic creatures. Our organisms deteriorate over time. And what's happening to our faces and our bodies is the manifestation of that deterioration. There's no getting around it.

Nancy: What's the thing that has surprised you most about aging? These are the questions we ask all of the Crow's Feet people.

Val: You know, though my mother said this to me many, many times. She died when she was 93. She often said to me it was a surprise and she couldn't believe that she was old because she still felt like she was 35.

And I, that's the way I feel too. I don't think it's like childbirth, having a child. I don't think you can understand that until you actually experience it.

So though I'm 74, you know, when I'm talking to people who are in their thirties, and then I look away and I see this 74 year old face, I'm like, wait, who is that? There's very, you know, distinct disconnect between how old I actually am chronologically and how old I feel.

Nancy: And what would you tell your younger self, your 25 year old self about aging or the future?

Val: That it's, you know, be in the moment as much as possible because this goes like a flash. It goes like a blink. So try to be present and grateful in every moment.

Nancy: And look in the mirror and practice the mirror mindfulness.

Val: At 20, in my 20s, I'm not even sure that would have, I would have understood what that meant, you know, though I do believe that the sooner you start that, the better.

Nancy: That and sunscreen, right?

Val: Sunscreen is the most important beauty product you can put on your face.

Nancy: What do you think about the makeup-free Rihanna, Pamela Anderson, what do you think about that?

I kind of like it. I mean, I think makeup should be just for fun. And if you feel like making up your face, you feel like adorning yourself, and it's fun for you, I think that's fabulous.

And if you don't want to do it, well, that's great too.

Nancy: Very enlightening. Thank you so much for being our guest today. Is there anything else you want to add that I might have missed?

Val: Actually, I just would love you to send listeners to my sub-stack, how not to fuck up your face.

Nancy: Absolutely.

Val: Valerie Monroe, V-A-L-E-R-I-E, M-O-N-R-O-E dot substack.com.

Nancy: Thanks for listening to Crow's Feet, Life As We Age. And thanks to our podcast team, our founder, Nancy Peckinham, along with Betsy Allen, Lee J. Bench, Melinda Blau, Jan M.

Flynn, Gene Feldison, Jane Trombley, along with editor and sound designer, Rich Halton. And I'm Nancy Franklin. The Crow's Feet original theme was composed and performed by Rand Bishan.