Hillary is glowing. I want to know her secret.

I googled "Hillary's transformation" and "Hillary's face" and found I am not the only one wondering. One columnist described her as "bordering on babelicious." A Web site called Plasmetic.com -- highly esteemed -- I'm sure, claims her upgraded appearance is "a hotter topic than John Edwards' $400 haircuts." Her skin is described as flawless, Columnists and bloggers use the terms "dazzling" and "radiantly beautiful" to describe the senator.

Personally, I'm happy for her. Ever since she stepped into the public eye, her looks have been criticized. Most newspaper photos of Hillary printed in the last six months show her in her worst moments: looking tired and haggard, shot from below the chin up, taken when she's looking down and her skin is sagging. Profile shots, mouth-open shots, college-hippie-days shots. They all struck me as cruelly, deliberately unflattering.

Obama, meanwhile, flashes a smile and a wave darn near every day on darn near every front page. He is pinch-those-cheeks appealing. Sure, he's got those ears, but we love him anyway. He's just plain cute, and that's good enough. If he were hot, we wouldn't trust him. Such was the case, one co-worker said, with Mitt Romney. "He's too good looking. Somehow that makes him seem slimy." Given that, would John F. Kennedy even have stood a chance?

Rumor has it that Hillary has discovered Botox. Or perhaps it's microdermabrasion. Then again, microdermabrasion treatments are too harsh for a woman who is in the spotlight several times daily. "Who did the work?" the columnists wonder. "When?" "Where?"

After this morning, I join them is asking, "Where can I get his card?"

I needed a bra, you see. My beige bra had lost elasticity and life without a beige bra, as all women know, is unthinkable. On Kohl's racks, I spied a particularly cute one: beige, yes, but a push-up with lattice piping. It was as sexy as a beige bra can be and this morning, the Kohl's flyer announced it was on sale. It was featured front and center, right under the red-and-white words, "Seniors take another 15% off!"

En route to work, I ducked into Kohl's and snagged my new bra. The clerk, gray-haired and by my estimate somewhere in her 60s, smiled as she looked at it. "Oh! Isn't that pretty?"

"Isn't it though?" I said, delighted that she shared my good taste. My delight was short lived.

Still smiling, she asked, "Are you 55 or older? It's senior discount day."

I smiled again, looking for the joke. I waited for her to wink, for her to whisper, "Just say 'yes' and I'll give you 15% off!"

But she didn't. She studied my expression, decided she understood it.

"Oh, good for you! You're not!"

My mind reeled in confusion. "You don't really think I look 55, do you?" I held firmly to my smile.

"No. But we have to ask everyone so we don't offend anyone," she said.

"Yes, we do!" the idle clerk at the next check-out lane chimed in.

I wanted to suggest they change their policy to precisely the opposite: Ask no one so you don't offend everyone.

"Well, I could be 55 and just have had a really great facelift!" I said cheerily, digging for a response. Waiting for something like, "Well, if you've had a facelift, it was a great one because you look 35!"

But none came.

I swung out the door with a chuckle. It was all silliness, an older woman who spoke without thinking. Indeed, without even really looking.

I got into the driver's seat of my car and twisted the rear-view mirror toward me. Today was a pretty good day for me. And morning was when I always looked my best. I was having neither a good or bad hair day. Just a nice hair day. My makeup was 8 a.m. fresh. It had not had time to settle into the grooves of my wrinkles as it sometimes did at the end of a long, hard day. I was well rested, lightly caffeinated, nicely groomed. I was clearly no more than 43, passably 38.

The lady's comment -- excuse me, SENIOR lady's comment -- would have been completely laughable had I not started, in the last couple of years, noticing ... things going on in the area of my visage: the afore-mentioned settling of makeup at day's end, the seeming accelerated pace with which my laugh lines are deepening, the still subtle but oh-so-definite sagging of my jawline, and then the neck thing. We don't need to talk about the neck thing again.

I am saddened by how this all makes me feel, that a subtle shift in my looks bothers me as much as it does. Shallow or not, I'm determined to fool time, to twist its arms behind its back like a school yard bully picking on the class geek.

The solution rests with that babelicious new woman blasting across television screens every nano-second of this intensely heated political race. And if she truly seeks to represent the People, Hillary needs to lend a hand to sisters across this nation and answer our collective burning question: Girlfriend, what are you doing to look so fine?