The winner of the “Best Lie about Your Age” contest has been announced!

Krizia from www.myBeautyMatch.com

On August 22, 2008 I had the pleasure of spending a lovely afternoon with four other judges to read the entries from the “Best Lie about Your Age” Contest and crown a victorious winner.

The “Best Lie about Your Age” Contest (the first of its kind) is the brainchild of DefineYourself.ca, a website and community dedicated to women and their feelings about aging.

I laughed and debated with the other judges (Robina, Megan, Fauna, Donna and Ann) about the stories that had been submitted for the contest.

Many of the stories were what you would expect from a contest that asked to depict the best lie story you’ve ever told … but a lot of stories were a real surprise. A number of women (and men) admitted that they had never lied (EVER) about their age (but luckily half of the women surveyed revealed lying about their age). Although noble, these stories didn’t make the cut because the idea was to get an entertaining story about a good lie.

Surprisingly, many entries were about women who had lied about their age to let others believe they were older than their age (30% of women have admitted to adding candles to their birthday cake to “appear” older). I’ve got to admit to have been puzzled by that one until another judge talked about the payback of such a decision. You see if you are 38 and you tell someone that you just celebrated your 48th birthday, the automatic reaction would be along the lines of: “wow, you look incredible for your age”. It’s interesting that someone would get a kick out of being told constantly that they look great for their age because they tacked on an extra 10 years to their biological age.

Some stories, expectedly, were about women who had lied about their age because of the fear of chasing away a younger love interest … those stories were expected … but nevertheless entertaining and in many cases quite hilarious.

In the end after reading numerous submissions and taking time to individually score them there was a very clear winner. We all agreed that the winning entry had all the makings of a great story and the visual factor from the description was priceless.

After reading Cathy Andrew’s (from Toronto) story, it was impossible NOT to crown her the winner.

Cathy’s comical story about being “outed” during an intimate experience with her younger boyfriend was simply too good to be true. Basically, the story unfolds because Cathy had no choice but to confess that she had lied about her age when her hormone patch landed on her fairly freaked out boyfriend. This little unexpected incidence forced her to admit that the patch was in fact a menopausal low-dose hormone patch and NOT a contraceptive patch!

The other top four stories were also quite entertaining and one of them was in a sense quite sad because it’s the story of a woman who had to lie about her age to achieve a life goal that would set the course for the rest of her life (and she was in her 50s).

In the end, Cathy Andrew’s stories really met all of the criterion and the fun factor could not be ignored or denied!