I'm in my 50s and embrace my wrinkles. What is the best type of makeup that won't sink into fine lines?
Dear Proudly Wrinkled, First off: Good for you! I love hearing from women who are celebrating aging over dreading it. Frankly, I'd like to see more of this, especially on social media, where the graphic, omnipresent plastic surgery videos are becoming particularly grim. To my eye, a lined face is beautiful, can be radiant and is. Despite what the "anti-aging" racket will tell you, there's nothing to be afraid of.
However, as you note, older skin does acquire new beauty needs. Namely, as we lose collagen and elastin, our skin becomes drier and more delicate, and our complexions become flatter and less vibrant. There's also often an uneven texture to contend with — fine lines, wrinkles and visible pores — that can make applying any kind of makeup less, let's say, fluid than it was before.
What does all this mean? Well, for starters, the makeup you use today should be adding moisture to your skin, not soaking it up. Unless your skin happens to be extra oily, you should stay away from powders and anything with the word matte to avoid that cakey, creasy, extra-wizened look I'm imagining you've experienced and hated.
From your letter, I'm guessing you are, like me, a fairly low-maintenance person, so I'm not going to try to push a multi-step makeup routine here. But, if I were, I'd tell you that for best results, prep your skin with a moisturizing primer before applying your makeup. Next, create a pool of concealer or foundation on the back of your hand and then stipple it on slowly using a damp cosmetic sponge and a few high-quality makeup brushes designed for different parts of your face. According to makeup pros, these steps, plus a post-application setting spray, will give you a "flawless" finish. But depending on your temperament, it might be too annoying for everyday use. I myself apply my favorite products with my hands like a finger-painting child, so I know it can be done.
Let's just keep things simple. All skin is different, of course, but the best makeup for a face with wrinkles will tend to be lightweight liquid foundations and concealers, especially those that are makeup-skin care hybrids, which offer sheer coverage, won't settle into fine lines and tend to restore a natural-looking glow.
Here are some of my favorites:
Ilia Super Serum Skin Tint SPF 40: I first came upon this lightweight serum, plus foundation, plus sunscreen a few years back on Instagram, and now I wear it most days. It glides on your skin, and the coverage is sheer but just enough to even tone and boost dullness and make me look more awake than I feel.
L'Oreal Paris Age Perfect Radiant Serum Foundation SPF 50: This is a good swap for Ilia at a fraction of the price. The texture is somewhat thicker, and the coverage is a little denser. It's wildly well-reviewed, and though it won't make your skin quite as glowy as the Ilia version, many people prefer a less glowy finish. Also in this price point is e.l.f.'s Halo Glow Liquid Filter, which I haven't tried but has been highly recommended by a few women over 60 I trust.
Keys Soulcare It's Like Skin 2-in-1 Concealer + Tint: I did not know Alicia Keys had a cosmetics line until someone sent me this excellent skin tint and concealer, which has an incredible shade range, really brightens your skin and has a luxurious texture and feel.
Nars Light Reflecting Foundation: If you're willing to splash out price-wise, I have yet to meet a makeup artist who doesn't rave about this light-reflecting foundation from Nars. It's a gorgeous gorgeous product, buildable and smooth and, even at $54, a product many older women say they wouldn't want to live without.
Jones Road What the Foundation: I don't know that I'm legally allowed to talk about makeup for mature skin without mentioning Jones Road, a line that was specially designed with the needs of older women in mind. This particular product is a bit polarizing — it has the texture of a thicker balm or cream and takes a minute to blend. If you're willing to fiddle with it, the all-natural formula really does leave skin looking dewy and bright.
Laura Geller powders and concealers: If you're attached to using a powder formula, Laura Geller is the best game in older-lady makeup town. Her powders are actually baked on terracotta tiles and have an oddly satisfying creamy texture that's not as drying as the powder compacts you used in your youth. While you're there, Geller's under-eye concealers are some of the best I've tried for covering over — and not sinking into — fine lines.
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Time Magazine
an hour ago
- Time Magazine
The Unspoken Etiquette of Mourning on Social Media
When Molly Levine, 28, lost her father in the summer of 2023, 'life stopped.' Just weeks earlier, she had been dating, posting comedic TikToks, and balancing a high-stress product job at Google with sweaty nights out in New York. Now, she could barely get out of bed. She took leave from work and holed up with her family, surviving on chunks of chocolate babka she'd eat late at night, when everyone had cleared out of the family kitchen. Reading about death, finding meaning in memories, and searching for signs from the other side consumed her days. But another, more frivolous concern gnawed at her. 'After you lose someone, you have to immediately decide whether you're going to be one of those people who posts or not,' Levine says. 'And I know people say, 'There's no right way to grieve,' but on social media—it almost feels like there is.' What do you share? When do you share it? And is it bad if you don't post at all? These were the questions that tormented Levine in the weeks after her father's death. 'It feels silly,' she says. 'You're like, 'Is this what I'm really thinking about?' But you are.' Grief gone viral Jensen Moore, a journalism professor at The University of Oklahoma, studies how people grieve on social media. '[Millennials and Gen Z] post their breakfast. They post themselves on the toilet. They've done everything,' she says. 'So mourning online is just an extension of living their lives online for everyone to see.' Ten days after her father's passing, Levine crafted a 350-word caption to accompany a photo of her father to post on Instagram. Comments and DMs from her community poured in, offering their memories and condolences. But Levine, a social media savvy young millennial, knew the line between sharing and scaring. 'I really refined my message,' she says. 'I was very cognizant of how uncomfortable I could make other people.' As social media reshapes how we share—and grieve—there are many for whom public mourning still feels gauche, even offensive. Vogue editor Chloe Malle notably loathes mourning-by-emoji. 'An Instagram feed is just too public a platform for meaningful mourning,' she wrote in her 2014 essay, 'Why We Should Give Up Public Mourning on Social Media.' Yet, others are crucified for not posting quickly enough—like when 90210 fans attacked Jenny Garth for her silence after Luke Perry's death, or when the internet turned on the Friends cast for waiting days to acknowledge Matthew Perry's passing. In one of her studies, Moore examined how people self-police online grief. 'It used to be, you would never post a picture of someone grieving or a photo of the deceased,' Moore says. 'This generation is posting TikToks of themselves crying.' In 2013, the millennial 'funeral selfie' trend broke the internet, triggering a flood of commentary about the generation's perceived apathy and vanity. Over a decade later and the conversation still hasn't moved beyond moral panic. 'Do I have a photo with them? It's the first thing you think of when someone dies,' says Jay Bulger, a 43-year-old filmmaker from D.C. 'It's a mad scramble to post.' When Kobe Bryant died tragically in 2020, social media became one giant memorial. But mourners were criticized. 'Why are you sobbing online about a basketball player you didn't know?' Moore recalls the pushback. Public grief often reads as strategic—an invitation for sympathy, likes, or cultural proximity. Some call this new wave of mourning content 'performative grief,' says Moore. 'Because those likes can potentially earn you more followers, or in some cases, money.' But for those genuinely trying to express their loss, the online landscape can feel like a minefield: sincere grief is often met with suspicion, judgment, or the assumption that it's all for show. 'I have friends who've been very vocal with their grief, and people didn't know how to handle it,' Levine says. She recalls a conversation with friends, criticizing someone's post for being too raw, too unfiltered. 'People just don't know what to do with grief. We don't know how to talk about it without freaking people out.' Read More: When the Group Chat Replaces the Group There are practical reasons for grieving online, says Pelham Carter, a psychology professor at Birmingham City University. It spreads the word. It offers catharsis and connection. Engaging with a deceased person's profile can help sustain a bond beyond the grave. But every post, photo, or story risks transgressing invisible social landmines of what is and isn't acceptable. 'There are these very nuanced rules that are hard to navigate, because they are unwritten,' Carter explains. 'But you get a feeling for when there's been a breach in etiquette.' For Jack Irv, a 30-year-old actor who grew up in New York City, the entire production of grieving on social media 'feels exhibitionist.' In his early 20s, he was part of the city's graffiti scene, climbing up scaffoldings to spray paint with some of the city's best artists. But 'graffiti writers die all the time,' he says. It was the first time he saw his network mourning publicly. 'You get forced into action,' Irv explains. 'It's like proving who is closer. There's a competitive aspect.' Social media can breed competition and comparison, which extends to online grief, says Moore. 'Who's grieving better, who wrote the best eulogy, who posted the best photo, who was closest,' she says. Irv resents the tone of these posts—'It's like a long rambling story about the time they spilled making pasta together.' It feels cheap, he says, that intimacy gets flattened into a caption. Irv recalls in one instance, an acquaintance who was not especially close to the deceased, became the loudest mourner online. 'It made us all feel strange,' he says. Navigating grief's social hierarchy online can be fraught, Carter says. Posting too soon or too often can give the impression you were closer to the deceased than others believe you were. 'It's bumping yourself higher up in the hierarchy than people feel you should be,' says Carter. 'But it's very hard for us, especially in the throes of grief, to acknowledge that there are different forms of closeness.' Who gets to mourn online? In a 2022 study, Carter and co-author Rachel King found a striking disconnect: participants saw their own grief posts as genuine—but assumed others were just seeking attention. Most cited a 'genuine outpouring of grief' as their reason for posting. Yet they believed others were abusing the process. 'There was a hypocritical side,' Carter says. 'People assumed their grief was sincere—but others' were performative.' In 2019, Jennifer, 30, who asked that TIME not include her real name because of the sensitivity of the circumstance, lost a close friend to suicide. The loss sent shockwaves through her tightknit friend group. 'Privately, there were vulnerable conversations between friends where the grief felt real,' she recalls. 'But online, something shifted.' On Instagram, she says, the mourning felt curated. 'It felt more like perception management than actual grief.' In the weeks after her friend's death, unspoken rules emerged. 'The etiquette was: those closest to the deceased had the right to post, and their posts should be engaged with. If you weren't in the inner circle, the rule was: don't post,' she says. These rules were administered via cold shoulders and whispers. Digital anthropologist Crystal Abidin interviewed young people experiencing the first death of a friend to explore a core question: who gets to grieve, how, and why? She found the tension had less to do with competition between mourners and more to do with how grief was received by the inner circle. The young women in Abidin's study outlined unwritten rules: who gets to grieve first, who gets to grieve more, and what must stay private. Breaches often came down to timing—like posting before a partner or family member. On Facebook memorial pages, they didn't want the first post coming from a random friend. 'There's weight given to your tie to the deceased,' Abidin says. As consumers of the internet, 'we're savvy,' says linguist Korina Giaxoglou, author of A Narrative Approach to Social Media Mourning. 'Even at our most sincere, we still want our posts to reach and engage—that's what posting is.' But that doesn't make us hypocrites, she adds. 'You can want attention and still be fully present in your grief.' Read More: When TikTok Trends Send Kids to the Emergency Room In Western culture, open grief is often frowned upon, Giaxoglou says. There is an understanding that 'during the bereavement period you shouldn't seek attention.' But in other cultures, grief is communal. In the Asia Pacific region, where Abidin conducts much of her research, grieving loudly and publicly is 'how you show that you're a part of that community.' She says, 'It's not uncommon in some funerals to hire mourners whose jobs are to cry, because the louder the cries, the more it shows how loved this person was.' As younger generations move grief from bedrooms and chatrooms to public profiles, conversations around death are returning to the public square. 'As a community, we need to see these expressions in order to recover,' Giaxoglou says. 'Otherwise, it's like we're hiding our emotions.' A year later, Levine has developed a dark humor about grieving online. 'In some ways, if you don't post about your grief, it's like—did you even care?' she says with a smile. She remembers staring at her Instagram grid, wondering how to follow up a memorial post of her father: 'What's my re-entry going to be? I don't want to signal that I'm over it. I'll be grieving forever.' Years later, Levine is once again making funny videos on TikTok. 'I look back now, and wonder what changed where I was like, 'Okay, now I can post a sunset again.''
Tom's Guide
an hour ago
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This underrated plant has filled my yard with color all summer — and it's ideal for container gardening
There's a little-known plant that I discovered just a few years ago, and now it's become one of my favorite plants that I add to my yard for summer color. While I always plant hydrangeas, lavender, and pelargoniums — as they are among my favorite flowers — I'm also going to be adding this pretty plant to my regular list of must-haves to enjoy in my garden. And surprisingly, this plant that I find exquisite is not spoken about as much in gardening circles as my other favorites, but I want to change all that. My latest favorite is Lantana camara. The Royal Horticultural Society describes it as an 'evergreen shrub with sometimes prickly stems bearing wrinkled, ovate leaves and terminal clusters of salver-shaped flowers 1 cm across.' I don't think the description does it justice, and when you see it for yourself, you'll understand why. I first came across it at a local yard sale, where a nearby plantsman was selling an array of delights at the front of his house. He'd left an honesty box for payments, and as the plant was unlabelled, I had no one to ask what it was. Then, after posting a picture of it on Instagram, a garden designer friend told me it was a Lantana camara. Although I'm all for asking garden friends for advice, if I needed to identify a plant today, I'd quickly take a snap of it and use one of the latest plant finder apps, like Palmstreet or Pl@ntNet, to discover what it was. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. With a diameter of 12 inches across the top and 6.5 inches across the bottom, this 2-gallon pot is suitable for indoor and outdoor plants. It also comes with a saucer to prevent indoor or outdoor furniture becoming damaged with water marks. The pots feature an attractive vine design. Lantana camara is referred to as common lantana or 'Florida Flower', and it's a species of flowering plant in the verbena family that's native to the American tropics. It's a perennial shrub that typically grows to around 6.5 feet and can form dense thickets, but it can also be grown as an annual in locations that experience frosts. However, the downside of growing lantana is that it can be invasive in many areas, including Florida, Arizona, and Hawaii, which is why in these locations it's best grown in a container, which just happens to be my preference. The flowers are small and tubular, with each one having four petals, and they are arranged in clusters. The flowers come in red, yellow, white, pink and orange, although I favor the pink and yellow combo. Tutti fruityAlthough it's not obvious unless you rub the petals, the flowers have a tutti fruity smell, and there's even a variety that goes by the name — Lantana 'Calippo Tutti Frutti'. It's a tender evergreen shrub that grows to 18 inches. The Royal Horticultural Society states that its blooms 'emerge yellow, then change color to orange, then red, and finally pink as they age, with all colors appearing in a single flowerhead.' Lantanas are ideal if you're looking for a low-maintenance plant that will fill your borders and containers with color. I've stuck to using it as a container plant so far, but I'm tempted to plant it in my borders too. And apart from bringing color to your backyard they are a magnet for bees, butterflies and hummingbirds, and will reward you in droves. Growing conditions Lantana thrives in warm, sunny conditions and will tolerate heat, drought, and full sun, and it will keep flowering throughout the summer, rewarding you with colorful blooms. It will grow well in U.S. hardiness zones 7-11, but check the variety before you buy to see if this differs. Lantana prefers a well-draining, neutral soil and temperatures about 55°F, and will appreciate a humid environment and being kept moist. Plus, if the temperature stays above 55°F year round, you can expect it to keep blooming too. However, be careful if you have pets, as Lantana is toxic to dogs and cats. 1. Lantana will do best where it can get six hours of sunlight per day. 2. Keep it well watered and don't let the soil dry out. 3. Grow it in a container in tropical and subtropical regions to avoid it becoming invasive. It will prefer a pot with restricted root growth rather than a container that's oversized, so ensure you add a well-draining soil. 4. Deadhead the spent blooms to encourage further blooms.
Chicago Tribune
2 hours ago
- Chicago Tribune
Today in Chicago History: The Rev. Martin Luther King felled by rock during Marquette Park protest
Here's a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Aug. 5, according to the Tribune's archives. Is an important event missing from this date? Email us. Weather records (from the National Weather Service, Chicago) 1935: Leo Burnett started the Chicago ad agency that created the Jolly Green Giant, Pillsbury Doughboy and Morris the Cat commercials. 1955: Capt. George A. Stone, the pilot of a Northwest Orient Airlines Stratocruiser, was credited when all 68 people survived a crash landing at Chicago's Midway Airport. The crash occurred in the same area as a Braniff International Airways on July 17, 1955. Vintage Chicago Tribune: Plane crashes that stunned our city'Stone told officials of Northwest Orient Airlines that the propellers of the plane failed to reverse as he made a normal landing after a flight from Minneapolis,' the Tribune reported. 1966: During a march in Marquette Park to protest racial inequality in housing, Martin Luther King Jr. was struck by a rock. 'I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago,' King told reporters afterward. Vintage Chicago Tribune: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. leads 'the first significant freedom movement in the North'Subscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past.
