Read how LUCY CAVENDISH proved that women her age can dazzle

My middle-aged Love Island makeover: Read how LUCY CAVENDISH proved that instead of being a 56-year-old frump, women her age can dazzle

Am I Love Island ready? It sounds like an absurd question to ask of a 56-year-old single mother of four. It is an absurd question. And yet it’s one that I have pondered deeply over recent days — and especially when I look in the mirror.

For last month, I decided to apply to go on the new Love Island show for middle-aged single parents, called the Romance Retreat.

Half my friends thought it was a crazy idea. A reality dating programme when you’re in your sixth decade?

But I was really excited at the thought of finding love again amongst a hand-picked group of people at a similar stage of life to me. Well, that was until people started asking me how I would feel about the way I might look on TV.

It was my best friend who was most pointed. ‘Would you really be OK about your appearance?’ she asked. She wasn’t being mean. She was genuinely concerned about how I might feel.

Last month, I decided to apply to go on the new Love Island show for middle-aged single parents, called the Romance Retreat, writes 56-year-old Lucy Cavendish 

Half my friends thought it was a crazy idea. A reality dating programme when you’re in your sixth decade? Pictured: This season of Love Island

Love Island for young people is all about the bodies, after all. The girls are gorgeous and wander around in G-string bikinis and little else. They have perfect figures, long glossy hair, toned bronzed limbs and very white, straight teeth.

The boys are similarly God-like, with their six-packs, their rippling biceps and winningly cheeky smiles.

Now, I know Romance Retreat is for middle-aged people, and I’m pretty sure we won’t have to spend the entire time lounging around in bikinis. But clearly, though, the way we contestants look will make a difference to our chances — and to the way we are perceived by viewers.

I don’t expect to be judged on my overflowing cleavage, but I do want to look, well, like a woman you’d want to date rather than ask to wash your gym kit.

In order to stand any chance of staying sane and coping with a global television phenomenon, I realised I was going to have to up my game.

With no time to lose, I decided to call in the makeover experts: those brilliant women who can take one look at a middle-aged mum who’s let herself go and — with a wave of a mascara wand, a deft re-shape of an eyebrow and a cleverly-cinched belt — make her fully match fit again.

The truth is, it’s around this time of life that you really start to see who’s put in the grooming hours and who hasn’t. You look at friends and realise — with a stab of envy and self-loathing — that, unlike you, they’ve done their time at the salon having facials and peels and even Botox.

Their hair is bouncy because they listened to their expensive hairdressers and bothered with hair masks and deep conditioners. Their teeth are white because their dentist — also expensive — told them to drink their coffee through a straw.

Am I Love Island ready? It sounds like an absurd question to ask of a 56-year-old single mother of four

At my local gym (yes, I do go), all the women of my age are thin and fit and wear full make-up at 8am. Their skin has barely a wrinkle.

I worry about these women being back in the dating game — and many of them are — because the gap between them and me is in danger of yawning to a chasm.

I need help, I think, as I look around my preened and well-groomed village yoga class.

My biggest problem lies in my wardrobe. I have definitely lost my fashion mojo. Ten years ago, I could feasibly pass for a woman who knows how to dress, even if it was a bit of an act.

I wore pencil skirts and tucked-in shirts and high heels. I knew how to do my make-up. In summer, I bought slinky one-pieces from Heidi Klein and kaftans from Melissa Odabash. Even my wellies were Penelope Chilvers.

But now, two-and-a-half years on from my divorce, when I look in the mirror, what I see is a 56-year-old frump. There is no other word for it. I wear jeans (baggy ones) and jumpers (even more baggy).

My hair is hardly coiffured: I get it coloured every couple of months (to cover the grey) but it is cut just once a year . . . and that’s it.

The problem is I don’t know how to dress to signal how I feel. By which, I mean, I don’t cry every day any more, like I did in the early days of my marriage break-up, but I am still stuck in the clothing of a sad and unconfident woman and, at this age, I have no idea how to look sexy and sassy.

The fact is, when you don’t have to wear anything but jeans and old jumpers, you tend not to.

READ MORE: EXCLUSIVE: Domestic abuse charity calls on Love Island to ‘apply the same welfare standards to men’ after the girls were accused of ‘gaslighting and manipulation’ in ‘toxic femininity’ row

It’s one of the perils of the WFH trend — a self-isolation that starts with trainers on the school run and ends in a permanent rotation of what are essentially clothes for doing the gardening.

I live in the countryside. I walk the dogs. As a therapist, I see clients mainly online — but since we all dressed down during Covid, no one seems to mind that I’m wearing faded shirts and very slightly moth-eaten sweaters.

It’s not that I have entirely forgotten how to do it. Over the past year or so, I have been contemplating how to date and, even more importantly, what to wear on dates.

I have made the occasional effort to ‘dress up’ but, as I get older, my fashion sense has got increasingly out of kilter.

On the one hand, I am delighted to have to come to terms with my body, which I feel more relaxed about now than ever.

On the other, I can see that I am physically bigger and broader and more out of shape than I’ve ever been.

I am by far the biggest woman in my yoga class and, while this does not bother me, it would be nice to feel ‘put together’, as well as ‘body positive’.

In truth, I have never really known what to wear. I’ve always been off-trend. My lumps and bumps have never felt designer-friendly, so I have tended to shop on the High Street.

In my years of being married, I felt comfortable enough with my husband not to feel the need to ‘prove’ my femininity with dresses and skirts. When you love someone, you don’t really care that they are wearing the same jeans for days in a row.

However, this is not going to cut it when I am dating. Nor on a loved-up tropical island.

I don’t want to look ‘overdone’, but I do want to look sexy. I want casual, but also smart and relaxed; like the best kind of cocktail party. So, here I am on my Middle-Aged Love Island makeover, and it’s pure heaven …

Make-up: Use a brush and focus on the eyebrows  

The make-up artist Bethany Rich shows me how to do the best look for a woman of my age, starting, crucially, with skincare.

At home, I use Lumity facial oil and then Liz Earle moisturising cream (this was recommended to me by an older female friend who has amazing skin), but Bethany also has Weleda Skin Food (£11.21, Boots) for deep moisturising.

For winter skin, she uses a brightening serum before she applies make-up (Charlotte Tilbury’s Magic Serum Crystal Elixir, £65, charlottetilbury.com).

She explains how to do a bit of contouring, and tells me that Bobbi Brown cosmetics work very well on more mature skin to decrease the appearance of wrinkles and creases.

I am delighted to have to come to terms with my body, which I feel more relaxed about now than ever

I normally put my foundation on with my fingers but Bethany uses a brush for ‘a far more even tone’.

She tells me that eyebrows are key. ‘A well-defined eyebrow changes a face,’ she explains. In the past, women of my mother’s age had tiny eyebrows but now the bigger eyebrow is in.

Bethany uses an eyebrow pencil slightly darker than my usual colour and then uses a small brush to make them look even.

Hair: A change of parting can transform you  

Desmond Grundy, the hairdresser who’s worked with all the supermodels, including Kate Moss, changes my parting from the side to a more central one.

He tells me that a change as simple as this can really make us see ourselves in a different way. ‘If you need an impetus to feel differently about yourself, you need to make changes,’ he says. ‘Altering a parting means you see someone slightly different looking back at you in the mirror.’

He is right: I see myself anew again and am surprised by how pleased I feel.

He shows me how to backcomb my hair so there’s more volume — and I can see how to go from being a woman with hair to a woman with hair that other people envy.

Clothes: Clever tailoring means no shapewear  

Then it’s time to try on the clothes. The Mail’s fashion editor, Dinah van Tulleken, arrives with armfuls of dresses from the designer Roksanda, one of the best UK fashion success stories of recent years, who’s worn by Emma Stone, the Princess of Wales and Anne Hathaway, and gorgeous suits from Me+Em, which has cornered the market recently in glamorous dressing for the 40-plus age group.

Both labels are far more expensive than those I am used to buying, but their clothes are properly tailored for a body like mine. Perhaps, I start to think, investing in myself is the secret to making my romantic comeback.

On the rail, the dresses by Roksanda look huge. There’s also a long one by Me+Em that looks like a grown up version of something that I would wear to a party as a child. It has a sash and it’s pink — and I am rarely out of black or navy.

But once I have put them both on, I start to feel feminine and sexy. They cling in all the right places — and what’s especially lovely is that I don’t feel, as it were, ‘plus-sized’ in them.

I don’t wear shapewear because it’s so uncomfortable, but these fit so magically, I look more svelte anyway.

The outfit I love the most is the white three-piece Me+Em suit, which Dinah teams with high heels by Russell & Bromley. It’s been at least five years since I wore high heels

They are not ‘look at me’ dresses but they are great tricks for middle-aged mums who want to look instantly ‘done’. I am shocked by the effect on my confidence.

Colours get harder the less you wear them, but I am delighted by how good a gold silk shirt looks on me, and can just see myself in it sipping drinks at the bar of the new Love Island’s Romance Retreat. It’s a long time since I’ve been excited by clothes, but suddenly I am. I plot occasions to wear similar outfits on.

But the outfit I love the most is the white three-piece Me+Em suit, which Dinah teams with high heels by Russell & Bromley. It’s been at least five years since I wore high heels.

Beneath the suit? Nothing but my underwear, which is something I truly never thought I’d do, or would work. But I feel amazing — strong and sassy and cool.

Wearing this would unquestionably make me better at talking to men — and indeed flirting with them — because I feel desirable in it. It’s definitely sexy, but it’s not overt, like a miniskirt would be.

Of course, I know in real life such a suit is a ridiculous proposition. I’d get it dirty in a nano-second.

Yet the feeling it evokes — that I look like a million dollars — is something that lingers for days. Every time I look in the mirror, I get a rush of it again.

I am going to channel that feeling. I am going to do a lot of clothes shopping, change the way I wear my hair and practice doing better make-up.

And then I am going to stride out into the world, swishing my big hair over my classily-suited shoulder.

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