I wasn’t alone. Within days, word of the book was quietly ricocheting around my social circle, as friends confided that they, too, had picked it up. Since its release in January, “How Not to Look Old” has become a bestseller, and Krupp’s unfurrowed face has been all over the “Today” show, Time magazine and “Oprah,” dispensing advice on how to shed the style habits that make us “OL” (old lady) and learn the secrets of appearing “Y&H” (young and hip). Vanity loves company.

Krupp’s success is fueled largely by the sheer numbers of her potential readers: The baby boomers have now all fully passed into middle age and beyond, and we Gen-Xers are right there behind them. Forty still isn’t and never will be the new 30, but it isn’t a “Sunset Boulevard” death knell anymore, either. The women who once camped out for Whitesnake tickets are not going to go gentle into that Eileen Fisher.

The book also resonates because, to its credit, much of Krupp’s fast fix advice makes common sense. The author’s main mantra is a call to simple, unfussy elegance: loose hair, lighter makeup, restraint of embellishment. She also cautions as strongly against trying to look too young as she does against emulating grandma. You get to a certain stage in life, and Forever 21 and Urban Decay no longer speak to you. Your underpants no longer have funny sayings on them — or at least they shouldn’t. It’s a not-so-fine line between being youthful and relevant and being Dina Lohan.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself wondering what Charla would think of my sartorial choices — would she approve of the wrap dress for a party, or tell me to go with boot-cut jeans and heels? I’ve adopted some of her suggestions, trading my usual wine-colored lipstick for a glossy pink, taking my frumpy, mid-calf skirts to the tailor to be shortened to knee length, and getting some White Strips for my smile. Nothing’s ever going to make me 25 again, but I do look and feel a hell of a lot better.

But Krupp also has plenty of ideas as wackadoo as one would expect from the alternate reality of a New York City beauty editor. Her idea of skimping is to get Botox just once a year. She extols the virtues of personal shoppers and $70 concealers. She champions lightening your hair, which is fine if you’re melanin-challenged like me, but doesn’t do much to help if you’re African-American, Asian or olive skinned. She admits that personal upkeep requires effort, thought and expenditure, and assumes that if you’re reading her book, you’re up for at least some of the sacrifice.

One could argue that we’d be better served by nurturing our self-esteem than spending money on hair dye, that books like Krupp’s and shows like TLC’s “Ten Years Younger” prey on our deepest insecurities. But most of the women I know can read books and don shapewear at the same time. We can run our lives and still want to diminish our crow’s feet. If there’s something sad about our collective desire to stay as dewy fresh as possible, letting yourself go isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. And there’s nothing inherently ennobling about ugly shoes.

The tricky part is navigating that seemingly contradictory impulse to celebrate our maturity while doing everything in our power to fight it. How do we gauge how to feel about ourselves when nobody else seems to have figured out what to do with us either? Magazines throw the word “still” in front of their praise for actresses of a certain age, as in “still stunning Diane Lane,” or “still sexy Juliet Binoche.” Nothing like a qualifier to diminish the compliment. The media teasingly refers to Demi Moore and Madonna as cougars, but there’s a sting to the term too, a suggestion that to be desirable past a certain age makes one a predatory anomaly.

I can look at the cover of More, the women’s glossy for the post-Glamour, pre-AARP Magazine set and see the words “Strong. Sexy. Stylish” and think, yes, as a matter of fact, my peers are pretty strong, sexy and stylish. I can also think there’s something not so subtly condescending about the whole “You go, old girl!” message, the exfoliating-as-fast-as-I-can subtext.

Is it because, in typical women’s magazine fashion, More serves up empowerment with a hefty side of undermining? Because it assumes birthdays have “more in common with a colonoscopy than a Mardi Gras,” and suggests we keep an open mind about Botox because “There’s no reason to look like a crone”?

We all define for ourselves what aging gracefully means. My tattooed, badass, rock ‘n’ roll friend Tracey decided this year to let her wild tangle of hair go gray, and the gunmetal locks suit her perfectly. My knockout colleague Lana, on the other hand, recently vowed to keep up appearances “until there’s nothing left of me but bleach and surgical tape.” Personally, I’m about as high maintenance as my overbooked lifestyle and Rite Aid budget will allow. As I hobble toward my golden years, I’d like to make sure I still have something in the bank to retire on.

It’s humbling to try to thrive in a culture that’s all too eager to remind us that we’ve still got it, that we’re just fine for our age. We used to just be women. Now we’re a subcategory. At the height of our lives, we’re suddenly relegated to the perimenopausal Special Olympics.

When I turned 42 recently, I was pleased to have attained the magic number that any Douglas Adams fan will tell you is the answer to life, the universe and everything. It’s a time that, for many of us, is in fact pretty sweet. We’re at the apex of our careers, our kids are out of the harrowing baby and toddler years, we’re smarter and more erotically charged than ever. Aging, Charla Krupp asserts, sucks. But maturity has its upsides. Frankly, if wearing flattering pants and upgrading the moisturizer come with the territory, I’ll take them. It doesn’t mean I want to be great for my age. It just means I want to be great.

Bruce Springsteen

With all his trademark energy intact and backed with a massive string section, the Boss — who lost his longtime collaborator Clarence Clemons last year – kicked off the evening with a rousing version of “We Take Care of Our Own.” It was soulful, spirited and just the right touch of mournful.

LL Cool J

Admitting that “There is no way around this — we had a death in our family,” the night’s host then announced “the only thing right is to begin with a prayer … for our fallen sister.” Depending on your philosophic perspective, watching the audience solemnly bow its collective head while Cool James invoked our “heavenly father” was either a moving tribute or a sudden reminder of why having an atheist like Ricky Gervais host awards shows is a cool idea. But when he cut to clip of Whitney blowing the roof off with a live performance of “I Will Always Love You” at the Grammys a generation ago, it set a bar for vocal performance that would be damn near impossible to match for the rest of the night.

Alicia Keys and Bonnie Raitt

Honoring the late, great Etta James, two knockout performers of different eras and genres gave a stripped-down version of “Sunday Kind of Love.” It was one of the few pairings of the night that worked, a stunning moment of sincerity and finesse in an evening that often veered heavily to schmaltz.

Chris Brown

It’s not that we can expect the music industry to ignore chart-topping, domestic-abusing, frequently terrible Chris Brown. He’s had a huge year, and on Sunday’s broadcast, he even managed to pick up a Grammy. But aside from his historic awfulness, there’s another reason to ponder whether it was really necessary to subject America to two separate performances. Decked out in his preppy “I’m not dangerous, ladies!” varsity jacket, he jumped around lip-syncing “Turn Up the Music” and “Beautiful People” with a posse of bat-winged, masked performers in a performance apparently inspired by the old video game Q*Bert early in the night, then came back near the end for a dead-behind-the-eyes “tribute to dance.” At least he managed to prove that he doesn’t need his abusive record to be reviled; feel free to shun him just because he sucks.

Jennifer Hudson

It took the powerhouse Jennifer Hudson — who two years ago performed Houston’s most successful smash for the woman herself at the BET Awards — to take “I Will Always Love You” back from the place of power ballad clichés where it’s lived the last two decades and make it ache like new. No big crescendo, no sappy orchestration, just a clearly emotional Hudson belting her heart out. Beautiful.

Foo Fighters

In an intense performance outside the Staples Center for the regular folk, Dave Grohl and company – a gang whose own experience of tragedy was brought home by that audience member thrashing around in a Nirvana shirt — howled through a fiery rendition of their “never wanna die” anthem “Walk.” Later, picking up the Grammy for best rock performance, Grohl admitted, “We made this one in my garage with some microphones and a tape machine,” eloquently pleaded for “the human element of music” and promised, “It’s not about being perfect.” It was a shining example of old-school authenticity, only slightly undercut by the appearance, immediately after, of Ryan Seacrest.

Glen Campbell

Lifetime-achievement award winner Campbell, who last year announced he was facing Alzheimer’s and would release a final album and do one last tour, is not going gently into his disease. After the Band Perry shouted uncomprehendingly through “Gentle On My Mind” and Blake Shelton did a serviceable “Southern Nights,” it was Campbell himself who rocked the house. Looking undeniably unwell but in remarkably stronger voice than the likes of fellow Grammy performers Carrie Underwood or Paul McCartney, he staunchly belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy,” enthusiastically coaxing the entire audience to sing along. It was by the far the greatest exhibition of bad-ass, rock ‘n’ roll indominability of the night.

Katy Perry

Aw, remember when Katy Perry did the Grammys gently swaying in a trapeze swing, showing off home movies from her wedding? Sure you do; it was last year. Post-Russell Brand divorce Katy seems to have decided to go for a different vibe. Performing her new song “Part of Me,” she was all about shattering glass, engulfing ice effigies of men in flames, and declaring, “You can keep the diamond ring, in fact, you can keep everything.” Katy, you blue-haired, pissed-off little minx, you know what? I believe you.

Nicki Minaj

The Catholic Church hasn’t taken this much of a beating since Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” era. In a performance of “Roman Holiday” that topped even Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro,” Minaj went through a confession gone wrong, an exorcism, and wound up surrounded by dancing monks getting groped by hot leather babes – all while “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” took on a whole new meaning. Did we mention she levitated? It was the closest the Grammys has ever come to turning into a Ken Russell movie.

Adele

Taking the stage after vocal surgery in November, the night’s biggest winner was clearly not in as forceful voice as in her Royal Albert Hall performance of last year. But she was so clearly enjoying her triumphant night of multiple wins, pointing at herself while snarling, “You could have had this all,” she personified bittersweet awesomeness. When the audience thundered to its feet, Adele’s mastery of simultaneous heartbreak and victory was not just in powerful evidence, it was conspicuously infectious. And when, later, she tearfully picked up the final award of the night for album of the year, she copped both to an inspiring “rubbish relationship” and to fending off “oh my God, snot.” And that is whyyyyyyyy we will always love youuuuuuu, Adele.

How far to take retouching isn’t just an issue for glossy magazines anymore. As Glamour points out, there are over “70 iPhone apps to help you alter your photos before you press upload” – and even more possibilities once the images hit your computer. Perhaps that’s why Glamour readers are so comfortable with a little cleaning up here and there. The magazine reports that “Nearly 60 percent [of readers] feel it’s OK for a woman to tweak her personal pictures.” Moreover, a whopping “23 percent of women ages 25 to 29 do it; that number climbs to 41 percent among those ages 18 to 24.” The younger you are, it seems, the less inhibited you’ll be about retouching your image.

But readers are considerably less lenient when someone else is wielding the tools. “Only 43 percent of women said it was OK for magazines to retouch, and just 39 percent were comfortable with ads doing so.” Why so schizo? Perhaps the results reflect a level of previously unacknowledged vanity and hypocrisy – some rampant trend of falsifying our personal images. Glamour certainly takes a dim view of it, getting Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies” and “Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” to note, “It makes us think there must really be something wrong with us if we can’t even look as good as the average woman on Facebook.”

But there’s more to it. For one thing, unless you’re blatantly faking your looks for a dating profile (PS don’t), chances are whatever altering you do of your photos isn’t in the service of selling somebody an unattainable bill of goods. It’s one thing to be cool with zapping out a zit on a regular person’s avatar, but it’s another ball of wax entirely when a company is trying to sell a product based on an image that couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. Just this week, the British Advertising Standards Authority yet again yanked a major cosmetics campaign, noting that a recent L’Oreal ad featuring Rachel Weisz “misrepresented the results that the product could achieve.” And when magazines are peddling the fantasy that actresses are slinking into bikinis six weeks after delivering their twins, or, for that matter, that Faith Hill doesn’t have a collarbone and Kelly Clarkson doesn’t have a butt, well, perhaps readers are justified in feeling a little gun-shy. And, for another thing, the way that individuals use retouching isn’t always merely in service of looking as hot as possible. It’s often just about making the picture itself interesting – griming it up for a vintage effect, going crazy with the exposure. It’s a different kind of retouching, one that doesn’t begin and end with creating a fake set of abs on the cover of Ab Monthly.

Regardless, Glamour is clearly ready to heed the words of its readers. It’s not just altruism at play here: too many public embarrassments when the unaltered versions of overly enthusiastic photo spreads appear and your credibility is shot to hell. Yet it’s also an acknowledgment that, as Glamour puts it, “retouching has its limits — or should — and Glamour plans to take a stronger role in setting ours.” What’s at stake isn’t the softening of expression lines or removal of sleep-deprivation dark circles – those things will go on. But a too perfect image loses not just its humanity; it loses what sites like Flickr have based their whole appeal on: interestingness. “You told us you don’t want little things like freckles and scars removed,” Cindi Leive wrote, adding, “And while our policy has always been not to alter a woman’s body shape, we’ll also be asking photographers we hire not to manipulate body size in the photos we commission, even if a celebrity or model requests a digital diet.” Beautiful girls in beautiful photos still sell magazines – and by extension, lipstick and jeans and all the aspirational dreams associated with them. But a pledge to go a little easier on the alterations suggests the possible beginning of fashion’s unlikeliest trend ever. A dash of authenticity.

Lagerfeld’s remarks came within a piece in which he also declared, “If I was a woman in Russia I would be a lesbian, as the men are very ugly,” and that “Nobody wants Greece to disappear, but they have really disgusting habits – Italy as well.” He also claimed that Michelle Obama once said, “Why you don’t like my big black ass?” (the First Lady never said any such thing), and asserted that “People in magazines are 50 percent bimbo and 50 percent pregnant women.” So Adele gets off pretty lightly in the whole thing. Okay, his math might not be that far off on the magazine content thing, but it’s safe to say that while the man can rock a double-breasted silhouette like nobody’s business, he might just be a total moron.

Yet despite his unique version of high praise for Adele, plenty offense at Lagerfeld’s remarks. Fashion publicist Kelly Cutrone shot back on Twitter “Love Adele Boycott Chanel.” Anderson Cooper added Lagerfeld to his weekly “Ridiculist,” calling him, spectacularly, a “fashion designer and Edward Gorey cartoon character and chronic foot-in-mouth disease sufferer.”

For his part, Lagerfeld, perhaps sensing accurately that it’s one thing to put down Russia, Greece and Italy, but you do not want to screw with Adele fans, beat a hasty retreat from his remarks. “I’d like to say to Adele that I am your biggest admirer,” he added in Metro later in the week. “Sometimes when you take a sentence out of the article it changes the meaning of the thought. What I said was in relation to Lana Del Rey and the sentence has since been taken out of context from how it was originally published. I actually prefer Adele, she is my favorite singer and I am a great admirer of her. I lost over 30 kilos over 10 years ago and have kept it off. I know how it feels when the press is mean to you in regards to your appearance. Adele is a beautiful girl. She is the best. And I can’t wait for her next CD.” Thanks for tossing Adele the bone of a “beautiful face,” Karl.

It’s significant that in his original story, Lagerfeld very clearly decreed Adele “a little too fat,” but the paper’s writer Kenya Hunt quoted it Wednesday as “a little bit fat.” Frankly, neither line is cool, but Lagerfeld’s true observation, his deeming Adele “too fat,” shouldn’t be altered or toned down. It’s significant because it implies not merely that she is particular body type, but that said type is unacceptable, that it is “too” much to deal with. Too fat for whom? Not Adele, clearly. Not her throngs of fans.

Somehow, in this day and age, the fact that a young woman of ample proportions is making it is considered revolutionary – unnerving even. That’s not just Lagerfeld-specific idiocy either. This very week, New York Times magazine writer Jacob Brown crowned Lana Del Rey as “the perfect antidote to Rihanna-Gaga overload — dare we say, a skinnier Adele, a more stable Amy Winehouse.” Really? Who knew that the world needed a “skinnier” antidote to Adele, that her size was somehow on par with the late Winehouse’s addictions?

Thank God that Adele herself, who underwent throat surgery in November currently and has the top-selling album in the country, has a different set of priorities — one that doesn’t include giving a toss about what some fan-brandishing fashion designer or Lana Del Rey slobbering Times writer or anybody else thinks about her body. She tells Anderson Cooper on Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” “I don’t want to be some skinny mini with my tits out. I really don’t want to do it and I don’t want people confusing what it is that I am about…. I’ve never seen magazine covers and music videos and been like, I need to look like that to be a success.” She’s right, she doesn’t. She’s up for six Grammys this Sunday and has even managed to adorn the cover of Vogue, despite her crippling handicap of weighing over 100 pounds. She tells Cooper, “I represent the majority of women and I’m very proud of that.” But whatever your size, she represents a whole lot more — dare we say, a breathtaking voice of sanity in a size-obsessed world?

At issue is the group’s contention that by hiring Ellen DeGeneres for a new campaign, the department store is “jumping on the pro-gay bandwagon” and turning away from “traditional families.” The organization warns darkly that “Unless JC Penney decides to be neutral in the culture war then their brand transformation will be unsuccessful.” There is so much to love in that sentence alone. Culture war! Brand transformation! Fearless disregard for the rules of comma usage after a subordinate clause! “The majority of JC Penney shoppers will be offended,” they continue, “and choose to no longer shop there.”

JC Penney, however, which recently declared that “We share the same fundamental values as Ellen,” has  remained unmoved from its perch on a “pro-gay bandwagon” in the midst of a “culture war.” (I hope that bandwagon is reinforced.) Also unmoved: the woman at the center of the controversy.

On her daytime talk show Wednesday, DeGeneres cheerfully opened by talking about Proposition 8 being overturned in California, then segued into a riff about her partnership with Penney’s. “Normally I try not to pay attention to my haters,” she said, “but this time I’d like to talk about it.”

After announcing she was “proud and happy” that JC Penney was sticking by her side, she explained to America that “Being gay or pro-gay is not a bandwagon. You don’t get a free ride anywhere. There’s no music, and occasionally we’ll sing, ‘We Are Family,’ but that’s about it.” And she noted that “For a group that calls itself the Million Moms, they have only 40,000 members on their [Facebook] page. They’re rounding to the nearest million.” It was a witty retort to a campaign of hate, though frankly, not nearly as hilarious as the Million Moms’ depiction of DeGeneres as an “open homosexual spokesperson.”

On her show, DeGeneres read some of the hundreds of supportive messages that have been posted on the Million Moms’ own Facebook page since their campaign against her launched. DeGeneres has also received public support from, of all people, Bill O’Reilly, who said on his program Tuesday that the protest was “a witch hunt and shouldn’t happen.” When you’re too loathsome for Bill O’Reilly, you’ve really outdone yourself, loathsomeness-wise.

One Million Moms describes itself as an organization for people who are “fed up” and “tired,” one that devotes itself, seemingly exclusively, to complaining “on behalf of our children.” On her program Wednesday, DeGeneres said, “I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated, and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.” Even the most die-hard shopper knows that values aren’t just reasonably priced furnishings from the Cindy Crawford collection. They’re how you live. And if you’re going to be on a bandwagon, who wouldn’t choose the one without all those angry people on it?

It seems fair enough to create a boundary on a social media site. And it doesn’t take much searching – likely in your own friend feed – to see plenty of mothers who have profile photos or family albums that depict them proudly nursing their children.

The problem, however, is Facebook’s capriciousness enforcement terms, and how maddeningly punitive and arbitrary they can be. Some women skate by with nary an eyelash batted at their pictures. But a person whose photo is deemed by Facebook to have an unacceptable degree of nipple will not just find the picture removed, but often her account temporarily deleted on a vague “breach of terms of use” charge. Treating women like petty criminals for posting what are obviously not sexually explicit images is just stupid business.

So on Monday, mothers took to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and offices all over the world to do their lactating in person. As childbirth educator Emma Kwasnica, who attended a nurse-in in Houston this week, told the local CBS affiliate, “There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers.”

Judge for yourself — though be prepared that the occasional nipple may qualify the images as NSFW — the “Topfree Equal Rights Association” has a neat compilation of photos that Facebook users say have been removed over the years. Some of them dare to show a contentiously exposed, not-in-use breast along with a baby contentedly latched on the other one.

None of them seem especially incendiary — and none of them look that different from other photos that  survived just fine on Facebook. The idea that the biggest difference between the photos that stay and those that are deleted is “users who complain” is insulting. It tells women to be prepared to be punished, largely on the basis of whether someone else decides they ought to be. And in the same week that a jackass like Staples co-founder Tom Stemberg whined that the Affordable Care Act, which grants a “reasonable break time” and space for working mothers to express milk, will turn America’s workplaces into sinisterly futuristic-sounding “lactation chambers,” Facebook’s ongoing boneheadedness speaks to a larger issue. It illuminates the depressing reality that breast-feeding, after all this time, is still deemed inappropriate, unproductive and just plain icky. And that a nipple, even one with a hungry baby nearby, is just darn scandalous.

Why does it matter? And why would a woman choose to post a photo of her baby at her breast, anyway? Well, for starters, if you’ve got a baby, chances are high that you’re in a near-constant state of having somebody clamped on you. If somebody wants to take a picture, odds are good that’s what it’s going to be. It’s often sweet, tender and special, and photos encourage other people to accept it and maybe even give it a go themselves. A photo, after all, is a defining statement. And it’s one any mother, especially a new one, should be free to make.