If face lifts were like smart phones the price would keep coming down, there’d be a tempting new model every few years and people would line up for them in the mall. But so far they aren’t. They’re expensive and risky and most people don’t go around showing them off. That makes them fascinating, especially when it happens to a face you know.

I was surprised when a woman in yoga class announced, not whispered, that she was getting cosmetic surgery. There are certain things that women freely share. How much they paid for their shoes. The status of their sex lives. But cosmetic surgery has been a more private act, confided to only a few, leaving others to wonder “did she or didn’t she?”

But that is not the case with Ellen who openly discussed her plans to have cosmetic surgery. She even invited me to write about her although she didn’t want her real name published. No one has yet said “what a waste of money” or “how can you be so vain?” But she didn’t want to risk the judgment of strangers.

In March the week she turned 59 Ellen spent $11,000 and four hours in outpatient surgery to tighten the skin under her chin, smooth her forehead and minimize lines between her eyes and around her mouth. The money was part of an inheritance from her mother.

Ellen is an artist, swing dancer and kayaker. She’s happily married and lives in Sebastopol, Ca. where I live and where natural is the norm.

We tend not to use fertilizer on our tomatoes and we let ourselves ripen as nature intended.

That is, many do, or believe we should, or at least wouldn’t go as far as being surgically altered. I would probably have put Ellen in the same unprocessed category. I’ve never even seen her in makeup.

She said her goal was “not to look younger but to look better.” And she was doing this for herself. Her husband didn’t object to or encourage her decision. Like writer Nora Ephron, Ellen has long despaired of her neck. “I’ve always had a matronly neck, even when I was young.” The fleshy neck is a genetic trait shared by many of her mother’s side. She and her cousins even named the neck after her mother’s family. She knew she would never have an Audrey Hepburn profile but her goal was to lose “the jowly stuff,” which she’d been camouflaging with turtlenecks.

She also thought she’d begun to look “kind of tired. Gravity was happening.” And she had a sad look. “Sometimes people stop me on the street and say ‘oh, it’s not so bad.’”

She talked about her facelift dispassionately like she was rationalizing a makeover for the living room. Yet even though she grew up in Long Island where among her school friends “a nose job was a rite of passage,” she wasn’t cavalier about getting cut at 59. “Things can go wrong,” she said. “I could die.”

Her reason for telling people her intentions, she said, was so she wouldn’t back out. I told her to go for it; we all have our vanity. I color my hair and whiten my teeth. I’m not entirely wild about my neck either. But I’m pretty sure if I had an extra $11,000 I’d rather take my husband on a trip.

Ellen’s decision inspired that kind of reflection. She said several friends confessed they too might want a little remodeling and she suspected they were mostly stopped by money and courage. I think I’ve seen too many grim photos of botched plastic jobs on the internet. I’m still sad about Meg Ryan and Jessica Lange changing their faces. But after Ellen and I talked I’d go home and push my face around in the mirror. I used to have a sharper profile. One eye droops a little when I’m tired. There is a line between my eyes that is becoming a trench. I imagined Ellen studying me while I studied her and thinking “Good Lord, woman, what are you waiting for?”

Her surgery went fine; the recovery predictably uncomfortable. She was swollen, bruised and had to sleep sitting up for two nights. Her ears hurt where there was a lot of slicing and pulling. With her bandaged head she thought she looked like a nun and called herself Sister Moon Face.

After she healed she liked her face fine. It was a thinner more youthful looking Ellen. I told her I saw freckles which might have been hiding within wrinkles.

But, alas, it was not the neck of her dreams. Her doctor agreed to bring her back for a little more cutting but said the family neck grew outward and could never be tapered into a right angle. Much more surgery could damage her trachea and she said she had to agree “that breathing trumps vanity.”

Four months after surgery and her retouch, Ellen is content with a brighter face and a little less neck. If I didn’t know she had surgery I might notice that she looked refreshed and seems happier, but she’s not dramatically changed. Now she goes up to people who didn’t know in advance to ask, “Notice anything different?” One old acquaintance looked at her hard and said, “Your hair’s gone gray.”

There were 64 worn wooden steps on the charming narrow circular stairs that climb to the fourth floor apartment we rented in Paris. Every day I said to myself, “Feet, don’t fail me now.”

I’m a walker. I dance. I do cardio. I’m in pretty good shape. On some vacations I get accused by my lagger companions of doing a forced march. I expected to walk equally strong on this two week trip to France, striding with purpose and vigor, like those chirpy leaders of tour groups stabbing their umbrellas in the air and urging all their chickens to keep up.

But this time my body was forced to do more strolling and stopping. My feet hurt. I grew blisters. I should have packed my trusty tennies, as I was reminded by my husband, the man who covered France in hiking boots. But who wants to take on Paris in tennies?

The stylish French sported complicated gladiator sandals and tall boots to go with flirty tunics over skinny pants and tights. Their legs looked good. Their feet seemed to work fine. They clicked along sidewalks and galloped up and down Metro stairs without wincing.

I wore Moleskin and Dora the Explorer bandaids from my granddaughter’s stash that I found in my purse.

Before the trip I shopped at a healthy shoe store in California for the ideal walking shoes. I asked for something that would be good for walking cobblestones as well as city streets and the clerk said “you mean our go-to-Europe shoes” and produced a pair of dusky green Mary Janes (Clark’s) that were in the dorky-but-hip category. I wore them for a week before I left, in order to break them in.

But by the second day on vacation they were not my friend. Yet I pushed on. We walked up Montmartre and back down. We walked through cheese markets and art stalls, through museums and churches. In Notre Dame I gratefully collapsed in a seat where I could prop my tootsies on one of the giant stone chiseled pillars.

French women use their feet and ride bicycles. I watched a Parisian peer in stylish dress and no helmet point her bicycle into the chaotic traffic of the Bastille round-about. And she did it in high heels.

I came home recognizing two things. I have a body that still works, albeit one that better keep going to dance exercise, yoga and lifting weights. Also, if I want to keep seeing the world I have to put up with some discomfort. No pain, no Seine.

But I ask my sister travelers, what do you put on your feet to trek the world. And still look fairly chic when it’s time for an aperitif?

.

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.