Oh! de London Luv Dust by Yardley

I ran across this little treasure last week, and even though I don’t really “collect” cosmetics, I will pick items like this up when they are really interesting and/or super cheap.  This powder mitt with Luv Dust fits the bill.

I’ve written before how Yardley was quick to capitalize on the “London Invasion” thing started when the Beatles first visited America  in 1964.  They hired another icon of the British Scene, Jean Shrimpton to be the face of Yardley.  They gave the products catchy names and packaged it all up in lavender and blue stripes.

Several years ago I found a full bottle of the Yardley perfume, Oh! de London at a thrift store.  I put it on ebay and promptly had people fight over it.  Seems like I sold that bottle for around $250.  It appears that someone is now reproducing the perfume, though it is easy to tell from the vintage as the packaging is different.

And I have no idea if the scent is the same.  I was too young for cologne when it was so popular in the 60s, but I was not impressed with the contents of the bottle I found.  I was afraid that it had “turned” but the buyer was delighted with it and said it smelled exactly as she remembered.

The Luv Dust mitt is quite nice.  I don’t think it was ever used, as it is full of powder still, and it just has that new, unused look.

“…powders you with the scent for young lovers everywhere…”

There’s that word again –  young.  Do you think it was possible that we were so inundated with the concept of younger is better that we actually began to believe it?

I only bring this up because it seemed that last week everywhere I turned on the web, women were discussing age.  Many were questioning whether they were just doomed to the elastic waist pants set.    Even I mentioned it in my post about sewing a pair of shorts.

Isn’t it a shame that we spend so much time and energy fretting over aging?  I’m going to blame all those (M)ad men who tried so desperately to sell youth to the young in the 1960s.   The reality is that so many of us have allowed ourselves to devalue our aging selves, and that is sad.

Last year I spent a lot of time with my sister, who though seven years younger than me, was in some ways wiser.  I’d lament about my weight or my wrinkles, and she would gently remind me that I was judging myself too harshly.  Since her death I’ve come to realize what a gift her words were.   And I’ve come to see my age as a gift as well.

The perfect antidote to all the aging lamentations was a quote from author Kathleen Norris,  quoted on the American Age Fashion blog:

Age has drugged itself with bridge and movies and vain trips to the beauty parlor. One of the benefits of age is to wear the clothes one likes. Childhood is not often consciously happy; and youth almost never so.  But… age could be a sort of leisurely savoring of the distilled delights of all the mistaken years…