I love taking long walks every morning. 5-6 miles, usually. Sometimes longer. It’s great for the body, mind, AND spirit. Spending time in nature is so important to my well-being, and so is moving my body…I’m also an avid birder. I have feeders all over my yard. I became obsessed in my late 40s, and the hobby just gets more fascinating the more I learn… and especially the more closely I watch. Birding has honed my awareness and appreciation of the natural world around me. I’m also a choral singer. I’ve been singing in my church choir for over 15 years. It’s one of my greatest joys. Making beautiful music with others – especially harmony – is a great antidote to all the division and strife in modern society. I have a 19-year-old daughter, Amelia – a freshman at Clemson University – and we talk almost every day. She keeps me young at heart!

As I said in one of my videos, I’ve been “pro-age” since I was in my 30's! Even that far back, I can remember being uncomfortable with the way I saw women aging around me. The frantic dash to beat the clock… The obsession with looking youthful at any cost… The lengths to which women were going… The needles and the knives… It all seemed so exhausting to me. And inauthentic. It felt like the opposite of self-love, and, frankly, the opposite of beauty. (I believe John Keats’ famous line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is far more profound than most people realize.)

So few women on the public stage are aging naturally – we’re constantly fed unrealistic images by our media – so we barely know what mature beauty looks like. I believe that by perpetuating this notion that only youth is “beautiful” – which is what we do when we cling to it so desperately – we older women are selling ourselves short. Not to mention our daughters, granddaughters, and so on… The truth – there’s that word again! – is that there are different kinds of beauty that come to us at different stages of life. 

Fortunately, in my early 50s, I stumbled upon Cindy Joseph… and… well, it felt like coming home. To be honest, I ordered my first Boomstick because something deep in me cried “YES!” when I saw Cindy and heard her talk about her pro-age philosophy. Her words, her very BEING, rang true. The product was almost incidental. I would have bought a sack of potatoes to be part of Cindy Joseph’s movement! The fact that the product – Boomstick Color – turned out to be FABULOUS was icing on the cake. And now I’ve tried lots of the other products, and they’re all equally fabulous. Natural, healthy, easy, revealing (not concealing)… Everything I want my life to be. 

—Margaret Evans