Upsetting Day: How Not to Look Old

I can't think of a book that I hate more than How Not To Look Old by Charla Krupp (2008). I would rather own a book called Dogs: Should We Kill Them All Or Just The Tiniest Ones Because That Seems Like it Would Be Easy by Joss Whedon (writing as Eleanor Slimnipples). Welcome to Upsetting Day and fuck this book:

Dated fashion advice is always hilarious. I love a book from the '80s with a chapter about how your shoulders must be as large and robust as possible to be fashionable. How Not To Look Old is more than just fashion advice, though. It's as if someone asked, "What if a book could bully you?" and then tried to produce that result.

This book is the physical manifestation of someone calling a picture you've posted online "brave." It talks about women's bodies like they're rickety old jalopies that need maintenance and touch-ups, and it spends two hundred and twenty-four pages teaching you how to be low maintenance.

The writer of this book, Charla Krupp, notes on the jacket cover that "Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore- it's critical to every woman's personal and financial survival." She says her book is designed to "keep you in the game when everyone around you is a kid." I personally would like to still be able to play the game even if no one wants to bang me. Especially when that game is, I'm pretty sure, living life in general. Maybe having a job? Seems like a pretty important game to not get kicked out of.

This is a perfect time capsule of an era when women were starting to recognize ageism, but Charla thinks you can fight ageism by simply not aging at all! Therefore it will not be a problem. The thing is, some of us don't want to be the gracefully aging queen stepmom from Snow White. We want to be the wise old crone. I'm not saying I want to go full beef jerky in my old age, but I would like the option to without a book yelling at me.

Everything in this book reads like a motivational poster designed to neg you into doing better. So I turned some of its most classic gems into those. Feel free to print them out and hang them on your wall if you want to damage yourself psychologically. Please read every single one in the voice of Lucille Bluth.

It's compassionate advice from woman to woman: learn to make your boobs defy gravity. There are some general platitudes like this peppered throughout, but there's also practical advice with helpful photographs. However, I'm not sure I can trust that advice when the book starts by proclaiming this outfit on Christie Brinkley to be "Y&H," the book's abbreviation for "young and hip," instead of "OL" or "old lady." I saved so much time writing that I can now devote another three seconds to feeling bad about boob gravity.

I don't find this outfit Y&H at all, but then again, I am Y&L, young and lazy, and I don't think I have the neck strength to carry that mass of necklaces. This outfit looks like it was designed by a pack of crows that collected many trinkets for their crow master. Christie Brinkley is going to have to battle a murder of crows to keep that.

Enough about those completely fucked crows, though. Here are Charla's thoughts on skirts:

That's all skirts, right? What is the magic skirt that could pass this skirt test? I'll admit I didn't get a lot of this book, but the skirt section especially felt like a bridge troll's riddle. I know one of these skirts is Rumplestilskin, but I have no idea which?

Another reason this book is ridiculous to me is that it's enormous, hardback, and super tall for some reason. I suspect it's maybe so it can be in a large print for older women to read more easily while still maintaining its Y&H persona because the type isn't big; the whole book happens to be big! We all know there's nothing more Y&H than deciding what you're going to wear out tonight by CONSULTING THE SACRED TOME. I can easily see a woman in a hooded cloak placing this on a table, blowing off a thick layer of dust, and turning to the section on makeup to decide what lipstick she'll wear tonight. Charla has decreed red, but not too red, and glossy but not too glossy! Let the younging of the lips begiiiiiin! No! No no no, this is mauve! MAAAAUUUUUUUVE......

In Mauve's defense, what if I am older and sad? Oh well, the prophets have spoken. All mauve lipstick shall be fed to the volcano!

When the advice given isn't wholly arbitrary and confusing, it's super obvious. This snippet from the back cover warns you not to wear the classic Little-Red-Riding-Hood-Grandma-in-her-bed with-a-bonnet reading glasses. That's like saying if you don't want to look old, don't wear a floor-length white nightgown and wander the halls of a Victorian mansion mourning for your long-dead lover. It ages you when you do that! And stay away from full mummy wraps!

Then there's the advice that's just plain weird. Charla warns against using products designed to make your life easier so they don't make you look old, and then trying to help you combat this issue you've created for yourself because femininity is a game invented by Jigsaw and played against Michael Myers.

The young and hip have little eyeglass nests everywhere like squirrels hiding nuts for winter? The idea that young hip people don't lose things is so outdated. All of the young hip kids were raised on video games, and guess what, they've all got ADHD now. They have no idea where their glasses are. But really, though; were eyeglass necklaces ever even a trend? It's like Charla did a stock photo search for "old lady" and designed all her advice around not dressing like the first one she saw. Let's get into the real crazy shit now:

This gem is sandwiched among the many other tooth-related things that will make you look old, but I can't imagine a tooth embiggening procedure. Big teeth is scary. That's human instinct. Run from the big teeth! Your tiny teeth are nature's way of telling the world you are not a threat. Keep your teeth small, Y&Hers. And heed Charla's warning of finger glitter:

What amount of glitter is excessive? If you say avoid excessive glitter, it means there must be an acceptable amount of glitter. But if you go over that amount, you've triggered the jigsaw trap! One finger will be removed until the proper glitter equilibrium is achieved. You must twinkle, but never sparkle, you small-toothed, baby-fingered OL.

The glitter advice is one of the many things in this book that's funny to me because it's aged so poorly. Tik Tok is glitter central, and it also hosts a ton of other nail crimes listed in this book. The eyebrows section is all about pencil thin brows, where today we like them so big and thick that eyebrow growth serums are gaining popularity. There's an entire section on how great bangs are, and today bangs are considered a cry for help.

The author of this book was pretty famous in the mid-2000s. She followed up How Not To Look Old with a book called How To Never Look Fat Again: Over 1,000 Ways To Dress Thinner Without Dieting. She finds new ways to call even the most obscure body parts fat, including arm flap, which is a great phrase, and I'm sad it's being used for evil.

Charla, professional tooth size ager, was an editor for Glamour and InStyle magazines and did a bunch of style segments on The Today Show. She was popular enough to get an obituary in the New York Times when she died in 2012, and it's a shame she was too dead to have seen this, but the opening paragraph noted that although she died at 58, she looked like she died at 49!

That's the prize at the end of the Jigsaw game. Someday, if there's ever a zombie apocalypse, you get to be a hot zombie with big teeth and plain fingernails and the exact right length of skirt for shambling after a group of survivors. And if you follow Charla's advice to the letter, the last thing those poor people will do will be wrong about the age of your corpse.

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