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Beautycounter has the Main Line buzzing – but take away my Retin-A? No way!

June 22, 2015 / By Caroline O'Halloran / /

Just when I start giving serious thought to switching from Ban to a “natural deodorant” comes word I should pitch every stinkin’ beauty product in my bathroom.

Oy.

That word comes from Beautycounter, the “safe” products line that just paid the Main Line its first official visit.

About 80 local lovelies showed up at Radnor’s Avenue Kitchen the other night for a taste of Beautycounter culture.

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Filed Under: BUZZ Tagged With: Aging, Beauty, health

Guess what’s coming to the old Waterloo Gardens? (No, it’s not Devon Yard – yet)

June 15, 2015 / By Caroline O'Halloran / /

While Easttown Township mulls over Urban Outfitters’ latest plans for Devon Yard, another fashion enterprise is already moving in.

SAVVY Main Line has learned that the area’s biggest designer warehouse sale this side of Lilly Pulitzer will take place in the old Waterloo building this fall – marking the first time the lights will have been turned on since July 2012.

Setting up shop will be the Community Clothes Charity (CCC), a venerable non-profit that sells brand new and barely touched designer duds at super-low prices every October, with proceeds going to designated charities.

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Filed Under: BUZZ Tagged With: Aging, Devon, dining, fashion, shopping

Saving my skin (or why I was a Playboy model … sort of)

May 21, 2015 / By Caroline O'Halloran / /

I hold my x-rated photo album while dermatologist Adrienne Rencic checks for changes.
As some of you know, I’ve done a little fashion modeling over the years but a while back I posed for a very different kind of photo spread. I wasn’t showcasing the clothes on my back because, well, there weren’t any clothes on my back.
Here’s how it happened.
My brother and my father are both malignant melanoma survivors so I had long been a faithful, if not enthusiastic, patient of a dermatologist I used to call The Sun Nazi. Every year, the Sun Nazi would inspect the assorted moles, freckles and “beauty marks” peppering my epidermis, tsk tsk over my very faint tan lines, and implore me to get “Total Body Photography.”
About seven years ago – tired of excisions and biopsies – I took her advice and called the Dermatrak Skin Imaging Center (then in King of Prussia, now in Plymouth Meeting).
I’ll never forget my appointment.
After handing over a $500 check for the privilege, I shed all of my clothes (undies included) and jewelry and slipped on a white terry robe.
I was then told to stand in the center of a large blindingly bright studio where a man in a white coat (a photographer trying to look like a doc?) approached and asked me to hand him my robe.
He directed me through 30 minutes of unseemly poses while he clicked away. His job was to capture every square inch of me  – scalp, soles and lady parts included – in full-color digital 2D. As I bent and twisted and lifted, I remember wondering if he enjoyed his work.
My photo album came in the mail a few weeks later wrapped in brown paper and conspicuously marked “Personal” and “Private.” Oh dear, what does the mailman think I ordered?
I promptly hid the package – unopened – under my bed.
I still can’t bring myself to look at the pictures, but my new dermatologist seems to appreciate them. I tote my album along to my annual skin checks and she systematically compares every mole constellation against its celluloid counterpart, looking for changes in shape, size, color and spacing. (I’ve had nightmares about leaving the album in the waiting room or in my car. Mommy, what’s this?)
And I’m pleased to report that I’ve had only one suspicious removed since my X-rated escapade. Which means no new stitches, no fresh centipede scars.
So while the experience was debasing in every way (especially for a good Catholic girl like me), I recommend it.
Plus, when you’re middle aged, the photos are good for at least 10 years. Like well-spaced pregnancies, there’s ample time between photo shoots to forget the torture.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Aging, Beauty, health, skin cancer, skincare, total body photography

What we can all learn from Jane Pauley

March 9, 2015 / By Caroline O'Halloran / /

64 doesn’t sound old to me.” So declared veteran TV journalist Jane Pauley in West Chester Friday night to plug the paperback version of her book, Your Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life.
“Dateline” Jane is now 64. But you’d never know it – at least from my rear-mezzanine vantage point for the finale of West Chester University President’s Speaker series. She has the same silky-smart-but-warm voice, the same placid smile and the same sun-kissed hair ­– sans the girlish pony tail she sported nearly 40 years ago when she first replaced Barbara Walters opposite Tom Brokaw on the “Today” show.
Can you imagine a 25-year-old anchoring “Today” today? No how, no way.
Jane wore a sleek solid-gray dress and leg-lengthening pointy-toed nude stilettos. (Tres modern classic chic, a la TV first lady Claire Underwood.)
Her appearance is not my primary purpose here, however. (Funny – and a bit worrisome – how we gals can’t help but size up other women’s looks.)
Instead, I’d like to share some of Jane’s provocative (and occasionally funny!) pronouncements. Among them:
On aging:
I have the memory of an Etch-A-Sketch.
We are recalibrating the meaning of getting older; middle age is stretching out to decades. Death is the new old age.
60 is a lot more active than 50 was 10 years ago.
On hitting the big city and its bright lights as Today’s anchor at age 25:
My deficiency was youth; but I got over it.
Perhaps the luckiest day of my life: the day I didn’t make the 10th grade cheerleading squad and joined the speech/debate team instead, paving the way for a career in broadcast news.
On finally giving herself some credit for her early career successes:
I used to think it was all luck. But now I know it took courage.
On her most surprising interview subject.
Joan Rivers was much deeper thinker than any of you would have given her credit for.
On redefining ourselves in midlife:
Necessity is the mother of re-invention.
Sometimes we need to be re-introduced to ourselves.
Say yes more than you say no. The hardest part is going from “maybe” to “yes.”
“Doing” is more important than “thinking.”
Inspiration is everything: you just have to be looking. 

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Filed Under: BODY & SOUL Tagged With: Aging, Career Reinvention, Jane Pauley, midlife, West Chester University, Your Life Calling

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