What Can a Grown Woman Learn from a Gen-Z-Style Glow-Up?

Late last August, I did the most adult thing I have ever done. As back-to-school season reared its ugly head, and children stormed the aisles of their local drugstores demanding mechanical pencils and three-ring binders, I helped my favorite teenager sing a swan song to summer with a five-day trip to London. I have known Iris Apatow since she was a giggly, blonde seven-year-old, when I had just started working with her father, Judd, on my first TV show. Now 16, she’s a coolheaded, sometimes flat-ironed teen whom I would like to think of as the Ashley to my Mary-Kate. But on this trip, I was her chaperone—more like the Julie Andrews to her Anne Hathaway.

I was in London for work, and Iris was there for matters of the heart, so as I planned days of meetings, dinners, and theater while worrying about whether to carry an umbrella or order that extra espresso, she flitted around town with an amorphous group of hormonal, heart-hungry teens, subsisting on only processed carbs and emotion. We crossed over mostly when it was time to change outfits, and she’d narrate the tortured minutiae of her day between generous helpings of highlighter and slicks of glittery lip gloss. Being a teenager is all id—there’s no fixation on mindfulness routines, or check-ins with your corporate coach, or urgent calls to refill your estrogen cream. The only time Iris slowed down was when she was doing her makeup, and I took great pleasure in watching her prep her already shimmer-flecked face for more—more red lipstick; more mascara; and still more highlighter than I knew anyone could ever need, let alone want.

Unlike when I was a teenager and I terrorized my face with a cake of bronzer and a mauve lipstick, Iris was actually good at glam. I had never heard of Benefit Cosmetics’ Watt’s Up! the creamy, champagne-tinged twist-up stick that she was liberally dotting across her high, rosy cheekbones while detailing the altercation she’d been engaged in over text during a tour of Buckingham Palace. But I knew I wanted it. Not just the product but her technical savvy and product loyalty; her deep knowledge of the high-stakes world of YouTube beauty vlogging; and most important, the joie de vivre of someone living out the last of their true no-makeup days but blending another swipe of La Prairie cream blush up to their temples anyway.

A few months earlier, I had started to feel old. It wasn’t all at once but rather a slow drift toward an emotionally brittle way of life: It’s not an obsession with mortality (I know and love that one), or a fear of dying alone (also a favorite). This is deep in my bones, a sense that any giddy pleasure in inhabiting my own body is a thing of the past. I’ve always dreamed of being old, when I would truly embrace my kooky Iris Apfel style and finally feel at home eating porridge in a nightgown at 5 p.m. But I didn’t account for the sense of being an alien in my own flesh, and the horrifying realization that my form and my consciousness were braided together for the foreseeable future, both growing less and less vital.

Being freshly 33, I know that I am not technically old old. But the full hand that life has dealt me thus far has been both a high five and a punch in the face, and I am, quite frankly, exhausted. Throw in a little early menopause from a total hysterectomy (a mundane yet harrowing journey chronicled for Vogue), some illness-induced hair loss, and a brand-new sprinkling of stretch marks snaking their way up and over my breasts, and I am ready to apply for an AARP membership.

But my body isn’t the only thing creaking like an antique rocking chair. My makeup routine has also aged. It feels like yesterday that I visited Sephora for my first NARS Orgasm—a blush so popular that even Christian grannies don’t mind asking for it by name—and a woman at the MAC counter at Bloomingdale’s showed me how to pat my under-eyes with bone-white concealer. But it wasn’t yesterday; it was 15 years ago. All that I’ve added to my routine is the application of a brown powder along my wispy hairline, if I have time.

Having my makeup done by cutting-edge professionals as often as I do, I really have no excuse to be so bland. But even they are doing a constant variation on a “respectable adult” look. What I want is to feel young, like Iris—dewy, playful, a little messy in the right way. Like someone with no job. Like someone who owns several pairs of shorts. Like someone who has never had their heart broken or had a bad review, who has never rolled away and said, “Not tonight, babe. Migraine coming.” We all know the feeling: a sense that our lust for life has begun to lag and with it, our approach to beauty.

After our trip, I tried. I tried Tata Harper face oil all over my skin with Fenty Beauty highlighter slathered atop, randomly paired with a matte brown lipstick by Ohii, a standout from Urban Outfitters’ new in-house beauty range.

“Are you wearing some kind of . . . crafting glitter on your forehead?” my friend Willa asked when I stepped out for a hamburger in INC.redible’s You Glow Girl Iridescent Jelly—a great concept that I was not meant to execute.

I tried all sorts of new things, sometimes in the wrong place: hot-pink lips and winged blue eyeliner at a funeral; Popsicle-orange gloss and green eyes on a date I didn’t want to be on during a two-day-long hot flash. I even tried posting pictures and videos of these experiments on Instagram Stories, an imitation of the classic beauty tutorial gone horribly wrong.

I needed Iris back. Her energy, her facility with an eyebrow wand. So I invited her over for a sleepover, making sure to order six or seven kinds of potatoes (that’s what teenagers eat, right?).

At my house in Los Angeles, Iris test-drives a Givenchy red lipstick while walking me through “glowy” looks. “That’s really what I’m into. I love Victoria’s Secret models, their bronziness. I love people who, like, always smile with all their teeth,” she tells me, painting a picture of a mood board plastered with images of Drew Barrymore—at all ages, but specifically in the ’90s—and Paris Hilton, a reference she offers with a compelling lack of explanation as I try and fail to thread a Charlotte Tilbury Dry Sheet Mask over my ears. Iris giggles. “I will teach myself and then teach you.”

As a single woman peeking, terrified, into the morass of the 30-something dating world and pushing a trolley full of baggage, it turns out I have a lot to learn—about #masking, and the delusion that makeup can create a picture of perfection that belies the truth of my condition. “A lot of people are relying on other people for validation,” Iris tells me coolly. “But if you don’t feel good about yourself, there’s no way of even trying,” she continues, as if to explain that my matte face and aggressive eye aren’t telling a story of self-love. “If you’re doing it to impress someone else, then you never get to feel the real benefits of makeup.” And just like that, a Gen Z purveyor of YouTube makeup tricks and timeless wisdom effectively schools a millennial poster child for body positivity.

It will shock exactly zero of you to learn that I did not retain any of the skills that Iris taught me. But the spirit of getting a glow-up is now following me down the street, and with it the idea that while beauty has the power to change my sense of self, a foundation of love for the creaky, needy, and life-battered body I’m ornamenting is essential. It’s about more than pearlescent cheeks. It’s about a renewed sense of your own life force. Sometimes that comes from falling in love; sometimes that comes from the solitude of rejection; sometimes that comes from makeup. And sometimes that comes from a well-timed sleepover with someone for whom everything is illuminated.

Originally Appeared on Vogue