Staging Your Comeback: A Complete Beauty Revival for Women Over 45

Hopkins, known as “The Makeover Guy,” explains fashion dos, don'ts and oh-no-she-didn'ts for women in the “second act” of their lives. A quiz helps the reader identify which of six “Image Profiles” suits her tastes (“Casual,” “Romantic,” “Innovative,” etc.); clothes, hair and makeup tips follow accordingly. Hopkins is encouraging and helpful: he does not simply tell women to clean their closets of any unsuitable clothes. He provides a checklist of “what you'll need,” a 10-step to-do list and a questionnaire to determine which clothes to keep and which to toss. Benefiting from this book requires a certain amount of dedication—this is no quick-fix beauty mag article. There is even a “revival guide” journal in the back where readers can mark down outfits that worked or didn't work, collect contact information on their personal “beauty team” and keep track of daily, weekly and monthly beauty tasks. Hopkins's constant self-marketing can get annoying: irrelevant photos of himself litter the pages, and he wastes space touting his fashion victories over difficult clients. But his appearances on Oprah , the book's attention to detail and some astounding before-and-after photos attest to Hopkins's expertise. (May)