By The Way - Our Full Reply To Urban

We are so glad that the editor of Urban published our reply on 3 September! But on a whim, we thought we'd post the full letter we had written her on what we think about being on the scintillating side of 35 right here....

"As a 42-year-old freelance journalist, I read with interest the cover story “Wrong Side of 35” in last week’s Urban. I found it very intriguing that so many women, including yourself seemingly, think of their younger days with a tinge of regret, and that they feel that their beauty is a thing of the past. As such I am compelled to write to you about how I, together with many women I know, celebrate being older. I do not feel I am on the wrong side of 35, and in fact I seem to enjoy myself much more the older I get.

Together with Elaine Yeoh – a fellow 40-something-year-old friend based in Hong Kong – I started a blogazine called Simply Fabulicious in January 2009, which celebrates being “on the scintillating side of 35”, or even 40 for that matter. The reason why we started it was because we felt, women in this age group have so much going for them – more confidence, beauty, means, amongst other things – but it is not adequately addressed. They can be as glamorous and fun loving as they want, or as comfy and laid back, with no apologies. They have ‘been there, done that and bought the t-shirt’ so to speak and there is a refreshing sense of acceptance and security that comes with it. We call this a happy ‘Coming of Age’ and Simply Fabulicious celebrates all that with news about luxury travel (because we can afford it), food (because we know more about it and we don’t always want to cook), fashion (cos we look good and we are no longer geeky), kids (we love them), sex (we love that too and we know more tricks than the young’uns), etc in a happy, tongue-in-cheek spirit.

With Elaine in Hong Kong and myself in Singapore, we fill it as often as we can with international content of relevance to like-minded women. While still in its infancy, SimplyFab has grown to an average of over 2000 hits weekly, which we feel shows there are plenty of happy like-minded women (and men) out there.

For your interest, some of the most well received stories that we have run include how to be photographed naked:

http://simplyfabulicious.blogspot.com/2009/02/naughty-but-nice-how-best-to-be.html

And an appreciation of older women by a particularly good looking guest writer: http://simplyfabulicious.blogspot.com/2009/03/special-edition-international-womens.html)

We are not being ageist, but we do enjoy life incredibly much, and it just seems one-sided to portray women in our age group as ‘formerlies’ to borrow the word from Dolgoff. I’d like to think we are at the prime of our lives – just that the girls in their 20s don’t know what’s in store for them yet!"

- Ee Waun
(Yes, we admit the pictures here do nothing for the post but just add some eye candy to break up the chunks of words!)