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IN GREAT COMPANY
How Do You Age Well, Nina Lorez Collins?
Isabel Burton
Date
Mar. 23, 2022
Read Time
3 min
Having a community is key to navigating this life journey feeling backed and buoyed, so we asked amazing women who weren’t born yesterday to share their MO.
You’d be hard pressed to find an aging-well advocate as passionate as Nina Lorez Collins. She’s the Chief Creative Officer for Hello Revel, a community where women forty and beyond share their smarts, savvy, humor, experience, and sense of adventure. Like Collins herself, the digital platform runs on a mission to reinvent midlife, and celebrate all that comes with this exciting and fascinating next phase. The 52-year-old Brooklyn resident, mom of four, and clearly energetic powerhouse, is also the founder of The Woolfer, a leading social platform for women in that same demographic, as well as the author of What Would Virginia Woolf Do? And Other Questions I Ask Myself As I Attempt to Age Without Apology. Needless to say, Collins doesn’t shy away from demanding that the midlife years, and women in general, get the spotlight. We suspect that call to action is in her blood: her late mother, ground-breaking filmmaker and writer, Kathleen Collins, also hailed all females. Here, a peek into Collins’ day, words to live by, and her best pick for a trusty vibrator.
If you could create a neon sign about aging, it’d say...Nothing ever stays the same; surrender and ride the waves. Also, the things you fear rarely happen.
When did you first realize you were hitting peri-menopause? At 46 when I started waking up at 3:30am like clockwork for the first time ever in my life. I had to Google it and then it all started to come together…the skipped periods, the increased anxiety, the sudden onset of extreme insomnia. Apparently that all equals perimenopause!
Do you have a funny menopause moment? Probably many. Let me think. There was the time I had my first ever hot flash while entering a fancy restaurant in East Hampton. I fled to the ladies’ room, took off my clothes, and applied cold paper towels all over my body until it passed. Then I went to the table and ate an entire basket of bread.
On the flip side, a time you wanted to cry…or punch a wall? That might be the time I had one of my last periods and what came out of my body can only be described as black sludge. I was quite horrified—is that even human?! Turns out that it is, and quite common. If only someone had told me what to expect!
Best wellness habit you’ve picked up? No more eating bread, for one. Drinking lots of water. Sleeping a ton. Moving every day.
Talk to us about confidence now vs the before times I’m about 10,000x more relaxed and confident now than ever before in my life. No doubt about it.
How are you kind to yourself? When I feel bummed or disappointed or afraid, I say to myself, “go rest, or go take a walk somewhere beautiful in nature; this will pass.” And I do, and it does.
What’s your bedtime routine? Wash my face, brush my teeth & hair, slather one of the many Eminence moisturizers on my face and neck, swallow around 10 pills, pull down the blackout shades, blow out the candle. Snuggle with dog or man, or both.
How do you maximize your morning? As long as my first meeting isn’t before 9:30am, all is well in the world. I wake up from insanely vivid and elaborate dreams and I like time to snooze and process and snuggle. Walk the dog, prepare a cup of hot water with lemon, maybe do a bit of exercise. I’m not a caffeine person, or a runner!
Skincare: what’s working for you right now? I get an amazing laser facial every 6 weeks from a woman named Valeriya in East Hampton. And I buy Eminence products like there’s a run on them. I’ve gotten lazier about Botox in the last few years, doing it sometimes, but not at all consistently the way I did from 37 to 50, ironically. No fillers, no surgery.
Other beauty secrets please! I think I’m often dehydrated and feel best when I remember to drink lots of water and eat only protein and vegetables.As a woman who wasn’t born yesterday, what’s your best girlfriend advice? It’s usually not about you. Focus on what you want, not what you think you’re supposed to want. Don’t waste your precious life being afraid.
What Nina Lorez Collins is Loving Right Now
My 4 adult children. They are my everything. Motherhood is in many ways thankless and impossible, but also endlessly rich and delightful. I can’t imagine a life without them.Iroha. Every woman needs a good vibrator.
Dry Farm Wines. Keto winers are a menopausal revelation!Art. Access to art and beauty of all kinds is a true gift for which I’m grateful every day.The Beach! I have a house in Springs on the East End of Long Island and it’s very much my happy place.Vienna. My favorite city in the world, hands down. Books. I’ve had a lifelong love affair with books. And I never read e-books! I love them as objects almost as much as for content.Tea. Mostly I like holding a warm ceramic cup in my hand. My white standard poodle, Strudel. is basically a living work of art. It gives me enormous pleasure to just observe him and keep him groomed and happy, not to mention sleep with him!Love. As author bell hooks says, ‘life without love is not worth living.’
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