**Giving Lip Service To Dumping Plastic Water Bottles

["Let Inga Tell You", La Jolla Light, published July 14, 2011] © 2011

I recently saw a beautiful choker necklace in a catalog and knew I had to have it.  But when it arrived, I discovered that the model had one thing I didn’t have:  a neck.  It isn’t really a weight issue (although no one has accused me to being thin for a very long time) so much as anatomy.  Unlike the swan-throated model, my head seems to sit directly on my shoulders making choker wearing problematical at best. 

As it turns out, I’m also missing a waist.  Of course, I make up for it by having multiples of other parts, like chins.  And thighs.  Women’s clothes are measured on fit models who are assumed to have standard parts.  They are not designed for those of us with three thighs and boobs that graze one’s belly button.  Which I think we’ll all agree is good news.  But it makes acquiring apparel a significant problem. 

Of course, one could consider having clothes custom made.  But I fear they would actually fit.   No one with no neck and no waist and three thighs really wants to emphasize those things.  We’re looking for the clothes that disguise our anatomical failings.

Actually, I’m puzzled as to where this body shape came from.  It’s definitely not the norm in my family, although I’m not the norm in my family in any other way either.  I’m a blue-eyed blond in a family of brown-eyed brunettes.  It was always my theory that someone out there is a family of blond hunchbacks who wonder why they have a normal-shaped brunette child. 

But for women, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. And if one lives in La Jolla, there is really no need for any imperfections whatsoever here in Cosmetic Surgery Mecca.

I have a slender exquisitely beautiful friend who has the precise right number of body parts in the perfect proportions but is obsessed about the wrinkle lines around her mouth.  Personally I’ve never noticed the wrinkle lines around her mouth and if I could trade one of my chins for mouth wrinkles, I’d do it in an upper arm wobble er, heartbeat.  Not long ago my friend found herself distressed enough about it to actually undergo a full face laser peel. It sounded totally miserable.  She referred to herself as Franken Face, refused all social contact and only ventured out to walk the dog in darkness.  Even her own children had limited access. 

But here’s the clincher on this one:  she is convinced that the wrinkles around her lips were caused by drinking from plastic water bottles.  You know, the ubiquitous bottles that everyone seems to have in hand or in purse at all times.  They’re more than a fashion accessory; they’re like another limb.  But one worth amputating if it would avoid wrinkles.  She’s asked me to put out the word:  don’t let this happen to you.  Dump the water bottles.

 A little research showed that lip-area wrinkles are also called smoker’s lip or whistler’s lip, since, of course, those activities have a similar pucker to water bottle consumption.  But then you start thinking of all the myriad lip puckering activities you actually engage in, like, for example, kissing.  And things that kissing could lead to.  In such an appearance-oriented place as La Jolla, this could put the kabolix on all manner of more intimate activities.   Although I think most guys in La Jolla would say that they should be so lucky that any puckering activities they’re interested in would be habitual.  Still, this water bottle/lip wrinkle thing gets too much play and pretty soon La Jolla guys are getting even less of what they say they weren’t getting anyway.  We’re talking major consequences here.

But not for me.  Zapping the lines around my lips won’t give me a waist or a neck or take away even a single thigh.   So bring on the Evian.  If I can’t be well-proportioned, I can at least be hydrated.