Okay, it’s 6:54 in the morning and I have nothing better to do than sit here and look through a two week old People Magazine that features a bunch of really pretty actresses with “no makeup”.   The deal is one I’m sure you are familiar with. The magazine strips these lovelies of their makeup and lays them out, blemishes and all, for the rest of us to see.  Weird, though, I never see any actual blemishes.  Or bags under their perfect youthful eyes.  Or the slightest sign of a crows foot.  In fact, almost no sign that their faces might ever move or see the light of day.  Hmmm.  Being the sleuth that I am, I found a surprisingly similar story from a few years ago titled  “It Takes Guts to Take it Off.  Who Dares to go Bare”.  After years of experience with beauty and gossip magazine reading, I know that this is a common sport.  The sport of asking beautiful young women who only just discovered the benefits of makeup four years ago when they stopped needing Clearasil to appear without their makeup.  They think we like it.  And maybe we do.  Apparently it’s a risky thing, the magazines always point out, appearing without makeup.  But they will do it, particularly if their publicists think it is a good idea and if they have a movie or tv show they need to get people interested in.  Or if their careers are failing.  Nothing gets people more interested in you than appearing with naked face in a national publication even if it is so SCARY for the star.  I guess it’s somewhat similar to asking me and my crowd to strip to their underwear, clench their butt cheeks and allow a photo to be taken from behind.  Hard to say a joyous “yes” to.  But I suppose if our publicist thought it was a good move?  So who dared?  The answer is several really beautiful woman well below the age of forty who may in fact be barefaced but are so beautifully and dramatically lit that it’s next to impossible to tell.  Check em out.So I looked long and hard at these women “daring to go bare” and thinking of my own clenched butt cheeks, wondered what this was supposed to tell us?  What were we supposed to get from these pics?  Were any of us really stupid enough to believe that these woman, or in many cases, girls, were really au natural.  Trust me, I used to be on TV.  My husband is a cameraman. These women may not have on any make up.  But these women have something going on and that’s called lighting.  And retouching.  HEAVY retouching.  Truth.  Most of us will never be as pretty as these women, as gifted in the bone structure department and most of us will only have our picture snapped by family members at family functions, usually from an unpleasant angle with our mouths hanging slightly open, a double chin and the only lighting coming from the sun.  And no one will ask us to go without makeup, even our spouses. who used to claim we looked better that way.  In face, when I do go without makeup, someone always assumes I’m sick and I have to assure them that I feel fine, I’m just “daring to go bare”.  This usually prompts a blank stare and a quick move on down the supermarket aisle.  Look, the reason these women look like movie stars even without makeup is because they ARE movie stars.  And beautiful one’s at that.  No one is asking Seth Rogen to “Dare to go Bare” although I suspect he always does.   These women, in all their barenaked glory have been lit to high heaven.  The amount of light on their faces, bleaching them smooth and unspotted would, in a normal world, would require tapping into and sucking dry the electrical grid and possibly blacking out the Northeast.  And can we talk about retouching.  My god.  After forty, we should all be assigned a retoucher to follow us everywhere.  My friend Jane believes that there is a poetry in the failure of eyesight as we age.  If you don’t wear your glasses, after a certain age, then whenever you look in the mirror you are instantly retouched. As she says, no nasal labial sag, no wrinkles, beautiful complexion. The key is how to keep everyone in your life from wearing their glasses and that seems unrealistic.  And problematic.  You might look good to everyone around you but suddenly the world will stop because no one can actually see what they’re doing.  It may be a small price to pay but I can’t see convincing Obama that this is something we should encourage for vanity’s sake. I do know, should your eyesight be still quite good or you actually want to appear attractive to those not just suffering from myopia, there are some tricks for looking better in a pic.  Find your side.  We all have one.  I have one eye smaller than the other so the smaller one needs to always go toward the camera.  Chin extended but sort of tipped forward as if you were extending your neck .  Avoid that double chin at all costs.  I ALWAYS raise my eyebrows.  It’s a mini, very short term facelift with none of the pain, the expense or the sutures and blood.  Trust me, it’s all a science. And finally , when possible, I have very good lighting.  Lighting beats makeup ANY day.  At least in a photo.  I am going to show you the difference below.  Me, daring to go bare.  As much as it kills me to not have on lipstick.  I think we each have our things.  I can’t go for a jog without lipstick even though my friend and jogging partner Kristina thinks I look way better without it.  She seems to be the only one who doesn’t think I look sick but I often wonder if this is some weird passive aggressive thing she’s doing trying to make me look bad in case I run faster.  She, of course, has to put on eyebrow pencil before we run.  I think that is just weird.

So down below, so to speak, I take it all off just to show you the power of good lighting.  And retouching.  The first pic is a snap from the nice family camera with a flash.  The second, a picture with lighting but very close from my spouse who makes thousands of dollars a day filming anyone from Angelina Jolie to Ann Curry and Stephen Colbert.  And they always look good.  Particularly Stephen. And the last was sweetly retouched by my friend Rob, an extraordinary photographer(www.robfortunato.com) who has, according to my kids, somehow shaved fifteen years off my life by eliminating anything that might show I had lived on the planet.  And it took him less than an hour.  My boys actually looked at Rob’s picture when I asked if it looked like me and they said “Yeah, mom.  How old were you when they took it?”  The were shocked when I said that the pic was an hour old and not from nursery school.  It’s pretty interesting to look at the three.  Deep, no.  Interesting, yes.

So here’s the deal.  Unless you can travel with your retoucher or only hang out with people who are not wearing their glasses, don’t go bare.  Or go bare but know that people will think you’re sick.  And they’ll count your wrinkles.  Or do what my friend Jean Godfrey June suggests.  Jean is the ultra talented beauty editor of Lucky Magazine and the author of the book “Free Gift With Purchase”.  Jean knows everything there is to know about looking good.  She’s not twelve and she always looks beautiful. Jean is one of these natural San Francisco beauties, all fresh faced and seemingly bare save for what appears to be a slick of Vaseline on the lips.  But as Jean will tell you, it takes some very artful makeup application to look like you aren’t wearing anything.

Here’s what she swears by:

I say use Jeans tips.  Then no one will ever say you look tired or sick.  And they will think you are perfectly preserved.  And that you “Dare to go Bare”.  Somehow that get’s me thinking about clenched butt cheeks again.  And I would rather NOT think about butt cheeks, particularly with bathing suit season here.  The other thing People and other magazines seem to be really attentive to are celebrity weight issues.  Once again, back to the butt cheeks.  Stop me.  It’s like a bad dream, the clenched butt cheeks in my head.  Next week:  Reality Shows we’d(those of us of a certain age) ACTUALLY watch.  And magazine headlines that would make us buy. And we’re not talking celebrities yoyo dieting or willingness to go makeup free.  Or Jon and Kate, whoever they are.  We’re talking things that WE care about.  Like “The Chardonnay Diet…Lose Pounds and Inches by Giving Up Food”.  Or “Survivor: Suburbia”.