One thing great about getting older: You realize that clothes don’t matter. The cut, the style, the trendiness of whatever you’ve got on, BLAH! Those things don’t influence what you telegraph. ALL of them are subservient to…to what? Can you guess?

COLOR. Color is everything. Have you hit upon this grand realization yet? The color you’re wearing can determine if it’s going to be a good day or a bad day. Gather your friends and have them tell you, if you don’t know, what colors bring out the best in you. What colors make you soar through space, or feel spiritually aligned and radiant?

You may not be the best judge. Most people aren’t. But once discovered, the right color is right. It is holy. It releases your essence.

With help, I have boiled my colors down to hot coral-orange and icy turquoise blue. It’s one or the other, generally not both together. And I’m trying hard to get out of black, changing my neutral base to a color in my hair: kind of a taupe-y olive or khaki. I look back on the days when I wore red, burgundy, navy, or ivory and I see confusion. My old colors now tell me the sad news that I didn’t know who I was. But I had to go through all those colors to get to where I am now.

And I still relapse. Now and then, I’ll pull something out of my closet–say, an ivory V-neck top that looks good with my ivory beaded flea-market cardigan. And I’ll think in my chattering way: “I shouldn’t have to wear bright colors every day of the week, right?” Wrong. By four o’clock in the afternoon, I gaze at my pallid porcelain self in the mirror and I say: “Ooops! Mistake! You lost yourself today! Tomorrow I will choose to glow again!”