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November 30, 2008

MIAMI — Charla Krupp is making a p

KATHRYN WEXLER McClatchy Newspapers

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MIAMI — Charla Krupp is making a point. • Actually, she is making many points. • The style advice expert says too many women older than 40 look “OL” — shorthand for “Old Lady” — with their rimless glasses, flat hair, heavy eyeliner, matte foundation ... • What these women need is a Y&H makeover. That’s Charla-speak for “Young and Hip.”

“We’re not going to celebrate our wrinkles (you’ve got to be kidding),” she writes in her recent book, “How Not To Look Old” (Springboard Press, $25.99).

No, we’re going to spackle those babies. Zap ’em. Botox the hell out of them.

Look, something like 50 million cells die every second on a human body. Things are gonna droop. Others are gonna dimple. Fashion will march forward while we, with bifocals and varicose veins, eventually fall behind. We lost this battle the moment we were born.

But Krupp’s not buying it. “Youth is associated with fresh ideas,” says Krupp, sitting outside at the Biltmore Hotel during a South Florida book tour.

“That’s really unfair,” adds she, of perfectly highlighted hair, Milly dress and Cole Haan shoes.

Krupp’s joins an endless procession of beauty advice books, many written these days by dermatologists esoterically discussing the benefits of IPL lasers over fractional resurfacing lasers.

But Krupp is no doctor, and she immediately dismisses cosmetic surgery. Too much down-time. But neither is she shoveling the usual blather about the wonders of sit-ups and reverse-osmosis water.

The former beauty director of Glamour and editor of InStyle has written a book that reads like one of those glossy magazines with chapters that begin, “Nothing Ages You Like ...”

Much of it will seem like common sense to anyone mildly plugged into fashion. Don’t wear elastic-waist pants. Revelation!

But many of her rules are more subtle. She deplores embellished jeans, fussy earrings, dark lipstick and nail polish, and outfits that look “like you’ve tried too hard.”

Her advice is concrete and often very easy to implement. Use this book and you will look younger. But some of the very people Krupp is writing for — people who still own flannel shirts and acid-washed jeans — may wonder why they should care.

Krupp makes the case that if you look OL, you appear at odds with society’s crosscurrents. You are a faded rose. Desiccated fruit. A goner.

Charla, this is the stuff that makes feminists throw up.

She fixes me with perfectly primped eyes — no clumpy mascara or thick black liner here.

“I am the most ardent feminist you will find in your entire life,” she says with fresh intensity. “I am saying women should be so unapologetic, so fierce, so unambivalent, so intense about conquering the world. And be great looking, too.”

Krupp, a fixture on chatty TV shows, knows how to sell a book. She says her work is about more than vanity. It’s about paying the mortgage.

She must envision women of a certain age heading to job interviews across the country, their prospects crippled by the white eye shadow on their lids.

“More women are single in this demographic, and more will live to 100 than ever before,” she says. “The economy’s in a downturn. People are losing their jobs. They need to reinvent themselves. No one’s hiring people in their 50s. They need to look young!”

‘In Hollywood, the euphemism is, ‘You don’t have an edge,’ ” Krupp says. In the magazine world, she says, it’s “We want someone who can go on TV and sell it.”

Her ideal isn’t about wearing a size 6. It’s about avoiding the stylistic blunders that mark you as out-of-touch.

“I’m not saying you should look like a beauty queen. But you want to look like you know what’s going on in the world.”

In other words, if you’re not “with it,” as they say, you’re “out of it.” And being out of it is going to bite you in the butt some day soon. Especially if you don’t stop tucking in that blouse.

Krupp’s not a maverick. She’s not trying to change the world. She sees herself as merely helping us better maneuver through it.

And along those lines, there’s not a snowball’s chance that she’s revealing her age.

“Because it doesn’t do me any good,” she says. “People are so ageist.”

She’s got a point.