How to look like Sophia Loren.

"Mom, Mrs. Brown is on the phone!" my daughter yelled out the window. I was in the yard and hadn't heard it ringing. When I went inside to take the call, I noticed the sauce on the stove was about to boil over the side of the pan. So, I reached into the drawer to grab a spoon to stir it. While chatting on the phone, I then proceeded to organize that drawer, since it was so cluttered I could barely retrieve the spoon. I hung up when my other daughter came into the kitchen with a cut on her knee. I went to grab her a band aid and realized we were out. I added them to the grocery list. Then I kissed my daughter and went back outside to finish what I had been doing in the first place.

Which was cleaning up dog poop.

Glamorous, suffice it to say, does not describe my day to day life. I am in the trenches of motherhood; driving and picking up, cleaning and cooking, helping with homework and saying bedtime prayers. Yes, it's great, and I wouldn't trade it for the world.

And yet.

I did not, the day I gave birth, relinquish my title "woman". I am still very much in possession of all the qualities that I had prior to getting married. (And which, by the way, helped me snag a man in the first place, thank you very much.) I still want to look good. I still want to be on trend. I still want to turn heads.

Sure, I'm not that bad. I wear make-up and color my gray hair. We have enough of a social life that I have an excuse to get dressed up from time to time. I forgo mom jeans and opt for skinny. Yet my routine, I must admit, has gotten a little stale.

Then a funny thing happened. My daughter said she wanted to learn Italian. (Well, actually she said she wanted to learn 'the language of my ancestors', which would be either German, Yiddish, Hungarian or Italian. So we are learning Italian.) Once she started I wanted to learn too! I fell in love with the language. In an effort to immerse myself in it completely, I rented some old Sophia Loren films.

I guess the only thing I can say that would appropriately describe this woman is Mamma Mia! Everything seems to be exaggerated - extra full lips, extra long lashes, extra high cheekbones, extra voluptuous body. I found myself looking at her and Marcello Mastriamo embracing on my screen and I thought, I want to look like that.

The first thing I did was go to a friend of mine who is obsessed with make-up and told her "do me over" She hemmed and hawed, warning me that other people have complained that she makes them look like tramps. "Good," was my response. She put on foundation, contoured my cheeks, lined my lips and colored my eyelids.

The total effect was amazing. While I would not do what she did every day (even Sophia didn't wear as much make-up as my friend put on me!) I did pick up some great tips. For sexy lips, a nude lip liner just around the outer lip. For dramatic eyes, eyeliner swept up, mimicking the sweep of the cheekbone. For Loren-esque cheeks, dark color right underneath the bone and color on the apple.

I got myself to the nearest Nordstroms and bought some nude lip liner and black liquid eyeliner faster than you can say bella donna. Now I had to worry about my hair.

I couldn't exactly copy what Sophia did with her hair any more than I could exactly copy her makeup, simply because this is some 40 odd years later. I would look ridiculous -and possibly like a drag queen- if I replicated her exact look. So, I modified things a bit. I decided the key was volume. Big, sexy lips and eyes need big sexy hair to match. So I dug into my old bag of tricks from when I was a teenager. The logical thing to do, it seemed, was to tease my hair. In my youth, the trend had been to have uber-high bangs - I have no idea why. It was sort of a status symbol if your bangs cleared the three inch mark.Naturally, then, I have some experience in this field. I set my whole head of hair on rollers. After I removed them, I pulled the top half up into a "pouf" a la Snooki from Jersey Shore (yes, you read that right.) Mine was a lot lower than hers; however, I did tease the heck out of it. With my fringe around my face softening the whole look, it was perfect.

I did not, of course, look anything like Sophia Loren. I possess neither her bosom (a thing of legend) nor her hips nor her tiny waist.  I am my own person, and I want to look like myself. She did inspire me, though. Now, I may not put on dramatic liquid liner every day or spend more time on my hair than on my kids all the time - but I do try to make more of an effort, every day, to be glamorous. The little things like a pair of earrings, a cool scarf, a fun eyeshadow or an amazing new pair of shoes...they really make a difference in how I feel. I am turning heads again when I walk to my car. Even if I'm just getting into that car and driving home to my husband and children, it feels good. And knowing that they would love me no matter what I look like? That feels even better. Grazi mille, Sopia.