I spent my Sweet 16 in France, learning life lessons from a painfully chic French girl named Emilie.  Two of the most important bon mots she passed along to young Jolie: 1) Always leave him wanting more; and 2) If you don’t drown your eyes in prodigious amounts of black eyeliner, you might as well be naked and just give up on life and die.  Emilie was fanatical about lining her eyes, and it looked ridiculously amazing on her.  I tried…but alas, I couldn’t quite capture her peculiarly Gallic insouciance and always looked one blink away from Crazy the Raccoon.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better at the eyeliner trick (lining the inner rims of both upper and bottom lashes, known as the waterline), which creates unbelievably fierce, sexy eyes.  Exhibit A: below!  (Exhibit B: Every boy under the age of 25 in Provence during the summer of 1995.  She was a firecracker, that one.)

PS - We have been having a lot of age issues recently.  Jolie realized last week that it is now physically impossible for her to have a Baby Jolie in her 20s…and then she was all, “Where is my life going?!”  So, please forgive me for being a total narcissist…but dude–how good do my makeup and hair look here?!  I can’t actually take credit for any of it; between the genuises at Neil George, and the pretty-making that is Bare Escentuals foundation and MAC eyeshadow, I’m just happy to have a not-awful, still-mostly-youthful canvas for them to work with!

So, step off, 30.   We’re still rocking 29.