“Too much sun. Not enough protein in the diet. But good grief. There are plenty of products that can slow the march of time, and she has enough money to go to the finest doctors. I’m not saying she (or they) should look like 20-year-olds, or like Joan Rivers, but it is not unreasonable to expect them to take care of themselves. Caroline’s mother certainly did.”
Thank you for your comments.
I agree with what you are saying. But there is something that flummoxes me. It has forever. It is the following:
I have lived most of my life in the Republic of Panama where we live 9 degrees from the equator...direct sun most of the time. We stay out of the sun. The heck with tans, etc. There is also skin cancers added because of too much sun.
Getting tan is not a sign of beauty here in Panama. Knowing what the sun can do, it is a sign of stupidity….Forgive me for being so blunt.
A little history: until the 1920s, in Western society, high-status women protected their skin from the sun because only women who worked outside, in the fields, were suntanned. Only low-status women had tans. Even the upper-class women who rode horses covered themselves up with hats, gloves, long sleeves, etc. Fast forward to an industrial society in Western Europe and the United States. By the 1920s, the vast majority of women who worked, worked inside and away from the sun. So the leisured classes, the high-status women, from that time on have tanned themselves to a crisp as an indicator of their access to boats, beaches, tennis courts, and other leisure activities only available to middle- and upper class women. Pale, untanned skin became a working-class indicator. For more detail about how this all works, I heartily recommend Thorstein Veblen’s “The Theory of the Leisure Class.”