There are so many good reasons not to go to Europe this year. The ashy cloud out of Iceland is still hovering and who knows when another volcano might decide to erupt and mess up a two week vacation? It could rain in Monet’s garden. The baguette bakers might go on strike.

Besides, how can we indulge ourselves when the world is so volatile and the economy so insecure? We’re getting close to that fixed income part of life. Will we be spending money that we will one day wish we had?

Think how sad the dog gets when we leave. Think of all the email that will pile up. What if the house sitter forgets to water the tomatoes? What about our promise to be frugal and buy local?

There could be a terrorist on our plane. There could be one on the airporter getting us to San Francisco. There could be an angry, anti-American zealot lurking at the Marais café where we lounge with our au lait and croissant. There could be bomb-makers at the adorable inn in the charming Loire village with all the great castles.

Well, we’re going anyhow, calling it our “pensioners to Paris package.” Even though maybe we should be biking through Utah while our legs still work. Or spending two weeks working on a kibbutz or teaching English to kids in Malaysia.

The last time my husband and I went to France was during the Bush years when the French were still smarting over that dumb crack about French fries and embarrassed U.S. travelers sported maple leaf flags pretending to be Canadian. But now the French seem to be smitten with Obama and liking us again. And the dollar is no longer defenseless against the euro.

It still takes almost a day to get from our house to France and I look forward to that dazzling moment after flying all night when you push up the window shade and the sun is coming up over what must be Ireland and then England and then there’s the English Channel and a swath of green farmland and brown and white cows and stone farmhouses with blue shutters.

I’m still in love with foreign travel. I know people whose long careers had them airborne so much that once they retire they’re thrilled to hang out at home. Not me. I get giddy just thinking about going to another part of the world. We’re traveling with another couple and we’ve been playing at going to France since winter. If you only have two weeks to actually be there, you want to stretch it out with a long countdown. We have French radio streaming from our laptops, Paris weather on the Google map. I’m reading memoirs of France by Gertrude Stein, MFK Fisher and Julia Child.

The world has shrunk since those Americans discovered France as a second home. Travel was more exotic and distancing then. Now we are a global village with a world economy. We share airspace, cyberspace and each other’s bad days. Each of us is only a ripple away from another part of the world’s failed economy, earthquake, oil spills, violence, corruption, wars and retaliatory attacks.

We may be separated by culture and language – my French, as they say, (heh, heh) est pathetique – but we know each other. The storybook farmers we will photograph in the Dordogne worry about holding onto to their fields just like California farmers. The chic people we will ogle on the Right Bank likely fret over cutbacks at work and how to keep their apartment.

To them we will bring our tourist dollars, affection and empathy.

My three-and-a-half year-old granddaughter already knows how to rub her lips together and do a big smack finish after putting on lip balm. And my 100-year-old friend, who lives alone on a mountain top, wouldn’t deign to answer her door until she has her lipstick on.. and her earrings. So, I guess this makeup ritual is pretty much a lifetime thing.

I started thinking about our girly-girl practice after Today TV anchors Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb did a no-make up day on television, in HD, no less. It was so rare a sighting that Brian Williams reported it on the nightly news, right there with oil spills and global debt.

It might have been just a fun gimmick to boost ratings but maybe there is a real trend to this natural look, coming so soon after Hollywood announced it’s tired of overly-altered actresses and want women with real faces and breasts.

We all know the tyranny of too much. The scary orange face that doesn’t match the neck.

For most everyday women, how hard would it be to give up wearing makeup? I mean nothing, not even your favorite mocha lipstick that lives in your jeans pocket even when you’re walking the dog.

I live in Northern California where it’s not uncommon to see bare-faced women. There are plenty of them at 7 a.m. at the gym. There are a lot of us who work at home and we can go all day before even thinking about putting on mascara or a bra, for that matter. Still, many of us know about putting on our “game face” before doing business or going out in public, depending on the situation.

But we also know the tyranny of too much. The scary orange face that doesn’t match the neck, the Geisha girl eyeliner, the drag queen blush. Growing up I had a friend whose mother never went downstairs to breakfast before putting on her false eyelashes.

At the same time I recognize how important a little makeup is to friends who’ve lost their hair and eyebrows to chemo.

I once dropped some money into the hand of a homeless woman sitting outside Neiman Marcus in San Francisco. She looked up and I saw that she had on a tasteful bit of eyeliner. I thought that a good sign. The woman had not given up, she was having a hard time but hanging on to her self-respect.

I once went natural on TV. The day I was to be a guest on a Houston early morning talk show the light in my hotel bathroom burned out. I couldn’t tell what I looked like. Plus I’d forgotten my eyeliner. I had little time to primp when I arrived at the station and the other guest on the show – we were there to talk about how Boomer women deal with aging – had arrived in perfectly flattering makeup. Our tanned hostess with long blonde hair and sleeveless top was easily 30 years younger than both of us. My bare face and I had no choice but to ignore the monitor and smile. At least, I had whitened my teeth before Houston.

There’s a new trend in women’s faces and it’s called real. Hollywood no longer wants faces that look unnatural, according to a story in the New York Times. Talent agents are advising their clients to avoid cosmetic surgery. Some directors are even saying no to obviously augmented breasts. Having a hard time finding believable faces in LA some casting directors are going to England and Australia. And get this – they especially appreciate older faces that look honestly mature.

Be still my pacemaker. This is good news, although I wouldn’t want to be a Hollywood hopeful swathed in bandages coming out of anesthesia and read that I could have saved a bundle and retained the family nose.

Yet it is encouraging when Hollywood, which sets an impossible beauty standard for actors as well as ordinary people, suddenly declares a newfound love for character lines.

They toy with us, these image makers. They say old is ugly and young is beautiful and skinny is even more beautiful. And foreheads shouldn’t move and necks should be long and chins firm. And then one day they yawn and say perfection is so boring.

And why should we non-movie stars care what someone in LA decrees is good box office? I guess it’s because as a culture we sometimes lapse into being vain and insecure and turn our attention from important things to wonder if life would be more fun if we looked like Julia Roberts.

This new Hollywood trend is akin to the fashion industry changing its mind every season, proclaiming that bell bottoms are back just as you’ve invested in new skinny jeans.

But this whimsical yearning by Hollywood for the new natural is more diabolical, it being a lot easier to alter hemlines than a profile.

Any trend toward natural obviously hasn’t been heard by those standing in line for the latest anti-aging cream, including one hotly advertised beauty product said to make eyelashes as lush as a cocker spaniel’s but which, in some cases, can cause permanently discolored eyelids and change blue eyes to brown.

When I was in my 20s I went to an eyelash salon in New York where someone applied individual long lashes over my own skimpy ones. I felt fabulous for about a week. And then my eyes started to itch and the new lashes all fell out, taking the old ones with them. Fortunately my lashes grew back, teaching me to be grateful for short stubbies and good mascara.

Lynn Redgrave didn’t look like a movie star and still did all right. An obituary for the British actress included an early description of her by critic Rex Reed. He wrote that she was “Treetop tall, all kneecaps, with hair that never seems to have met a stylist, a little round mouth invented for devouring hot fudge sundaes and a chubby figure that changes weight according to her mood.”

You can imagine Redgrave and her agent wincing when they read that, but considering her long, varied career I bet she came to enjoy her distinctive non-star looks.

There’s a lot to be said about a person who is more than another pretty face which is a good thing to remember when the image-makers change their mind again. And they probably will, declaring real was interesting but Barbie’s better.