“I rarely take ideas from anyone,” a young woman emailed me this morning, in response to my suggestion that she meet someone I know who could  give her valuable ideas for her job.

What a strange reply, I thought. Does she believe that no one could possibly have an idea better than her ideas? Is she afraid that it will make her less worthy if she takes someone else’s idea?

I’ve never been at a loss for ideas in my career and I’ve had competitors copy my ideas. I’ve also worried that someone would steal one of my ideas before I could act on it.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” George Bernard Shaw

An up- and-coming male executive at Fortune magazine actually appropriated one of my ideas,  after I brought the magazine in on it and we had a successful partnership. “We’re taking the project (a summit for c-level executive women) in-house,” he had a lower-level employee tell me.” That was 11 years ago. Since then, the idea thief was fired,  but Fortune produces a woman’s conference to this day. I think I let them get away with such unethical behavior because I was intimidated. Fortune, big magazine (at least then it was).  Geri Brin, lone entrepreneurial woman.

Sharing an idea sometimes helps makes it a better idea, especially if you share it with smart people who aren’t threatened by someone else’s ideas.  I think the young woman who sent me the email may be a bit threatened. Hopefully, she’ll see differently some day.

Even if I had a steaming hot body and a face that stopped traffic when I was 42, I wouldn’t have wanted to marry a 27-year-old guy.  I would have worried that he’d be less attracted to me when I was approaching FOF and he was 35, that he might want children someday, and that he’d be ready to party when I was ready to turn in for the night.

Less and Moore

Or, maybe I’d be so wrapped up in this younger man, I’d be incapable of making a wise decision.

Then again, if the young man and I were both big celebrities, there’s no telling what I’d be thinking or doing, because celebrities don’t think or act the way the rest of us do.

When Ashton Kutcher was taking a romp in the hay recently with 22-year-old Sara Leal, he reportedly told her he enjoys things like that because he’s an actor 90 percent of the time and it’s fake.  He said it’s nice to have moments that are real. “I’m here now and you’re here now, enjoying it,” he reportedly told his playmate.

So many celebrities are pathetic creatures.  They make me realize how lucky I am being obscure.

When we were young girls and ladies growing up all over the country,  a beauty company from France, named L’Oreal, was growing up right along with us. I remember my mom’s hairdresser, Mario, using L’Oreal to  cover her grays. I thought, ‘I’ll never go through all that!’ I remember the first time time I splurged to buy Lancome skin cream in the sixties (I had no idea at the time that it was owned by the hair color company). And I remember loving a perfume in the seventies  called  Anais Anais by Cacherel (another L’Oreal brand.)

Now, I have my hair colored with Matrix (yes, L’Oreal), I use Kerastase shampoo (yep, L’Oreal) and Kiehl’s hand cream (you guessed it!) What I love about L’Oreal, besides its products, is how much O’Loreal loves me. Me, as in FOF woman. L’Oreal has never deserted us. It was with us when we were growing into young women and now it’s with us as we go through our fabulous fifties and stupendous sixties. Its SkinCeuticals skin care line, for example, was created to help restore radiance to our skin and  protect it from environmental damage and serious conditions like melanoma. My dad died of melanoma, so I understand the importance of protecting my skin from this deadly cancer. (I’ve been using SkinCeuticals CE Ferulic for almost two weeks and I swear I feel it working. It was in the L’Oreal gift bag at the Beauty Bash.)

While other giant beauty companies pay lip service to FOFs, L’Oreal sends us strong and positive messages by using Diane Keaton and Andie McDowell to represent its brand image and consistently introducing innovative products to help us look as fabulous as ever.  L’Oreal knows how powerful and intelligent we are and will continue to be for years to come.

There’s another reason j’adore L’Oreal: It believes FOF is a great platform for many of its brands to connect with all of us in the digital era. It kicked off its partnership with us at our recent FOF Beauty Bash, where stylists, experts and educators from L’Oreal Paris, Matrix and SkinCeuticals offered “hair-apy, ” skin and makeup sessions to help us solve our most challenging haircare problems and improve the overall health and appearance of our skin.

Surrounded by a few good men: Jorge Cosano, to my left, and Marc Speichert, L'Oreal CMO, and Brent Bouchez of agency Five-0

How cool is this logo, developed for L'Oreal by Agency Five-O. It's almost as cool as ours.

L’Oreal executives know it isn’t the only beauty company on the block, and that we have a world of choices when it comes to what we put on our faces and in our hair. That’s why it’s not planning to sit back and rest on its laurels as almost-the-biggest-beauty-company in the world. It has identified FOF women–and men–as its two most important strategic consumer targets in the next decade.

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of women 55 to 64 years old  is expected to jump 31 percent by 2015 and the number of women 65 to 74 will grow by 36.5 percent,” said Jorge Cosano, the man who has been charged with leading L’Oreal’s effort with FOFs. “Our partnership with with FabOverFifty gives us the opportunity to start the conversation with these women, so we can understand them and their needs and what they expect beauty brands to deliver.”

I love it when someone with good taste compliments the way I’m dressed, when a food guru loves a meal I cooked or when an intelligent person thinks I have something on the ball.  I couldn’t think of a greater compliment to FOF than when Jorge decided to have L’Oreal partner with us. I’d say that makes him–and L’Oreal–pretty smart themselves.

-WORD

A new trend is making its way across cyberspace, which I call “Getting the last e-word.”  Not unlike getting the last word in a debate or the final summation in a trail, getting the last e-word means just what it says: Making an emphatic point in an online argument that you think gives you the upper hand…that is, until another email lands in your inbox from the opposing side.

It’s easy to let our fingers do the talking today, as they fly over the keyboard to compose our point of view. We’re not going to let some jerk have the last word when we still want to give him a piece of our mind.

A young man who worked at the PR agency we hired to promote the Beauty Bash would repeatedly defend himself whenever I took issue with his weak results. He’d write lengthy emails giving me his side. Since I thought his side was as weak as his performance, I kept sending emails back that reiterated my position, in different terms. That was dumb of me because I wasn’t going to teach this young man a bloody thing about how to be a stellar performer. We didn’t renew our contract with the company, which, I guess, counts as the last word.

Often e-mails make it impossible to discern what the sender really meant, because not everyone has the ability to coherently communicate his or her thoughts in writing. When we think we’re being attacked in e-mail, we either launch into the defensive or try to put our opposition on the defensive. Emails start flying through the air, which usually makes matters worse.

It’s better to walk away from the keyboard when we find ourselves wanting to react to an email we don’t like. No one ever really gets the last word, anyway.