Pony up to pay for pampering

Beauty will be all around at Chukkar Farm Polo Club during The Age of Elegance — An Olde Fashioned Picnic & Polo Benefit. For five hours, attendees who pay a flat $45 entry fee per vehicle can watch a polo match on the rolling 173-acre farm and picnic in an elegant setting. (Note: It’s a “bring your own feedbag” event.)

They also can avail themselves of facials, hand massages and other aesthetic care services in the “mini-spa” that will serve as a bite-sized version of the “Day of Timeless Beauty” events that O’Neil regularly organizes in senior centers and residential facilities.

Founded by O’Neil in 2005, the Beauty Becomes You Foundation uses volunteer licensed cosmetologists, students and health care professionals to provide free basic aesthetic and grooming services to seniors. The Timeless Beauty events are funded entirely through donations and can end up providing as many as 300 massages, hair, nail and skin care services in a single day. O’Neil, who pays many expenses herself, hopes to raise at least $25,000 so she can expand the foundation’s reach.

“Older adults who don’t have as much human contact and interaction can start to fade away inside and out,” said O’Neil, 51, a medical esthetics professional with a specialization in the psychology of appearance. “Helping them maintain and improve their appearance is a way of rebuilding self-esteem and reenergizing their interest in other aspects of their lives.”

That has been the case at Lutheran Towers, a senior housing community in Midtown Atlanta whose residents have twice experienced a Day of Timeless Beauty.

“The sense of being gently touched — there’s an intimacy to getting your hair done or a facial or pedicure,” said executive director David Sprowl. “You could see it in their posture [afterward],” he continued. “They walked straighter and more upright. Their self-esteem really rose.”

Think of it as the Timeless Beauty Bounce. It’s happened at the Dorothy C. Benson Senior Multipurpose Complex in Sandy Springs, too.

“They get a jump-start,” said Andre Gregory, senior services manager at one of the country’s largest day facilities for seniors, of the 220 clients who waited patiently in appointment lines and ate up talks on health issues and personal care at two of O’Neil’s events. “They still want to be involved in things, just like before.”

A lot like those horses on the 173 rolling acres in Alpharetta.

There are more than a dozen of them, ranging in age from 20 to 25. Technically, they belong to the Beauty Becomes You Foundation, although they live the good life on Cashin’s Chukkar Farm.

How good?

“I’m very proud of the fact that this is horse heaven for them,” chuckled Cashin, 85, about the former high-level competitive polo ponies. “They can roam, they can eat and they come up every morning around 9-9:30 and my daughter checks them out to see that they’re OK.”

Still a regular polo player himself, Cashin organizes and hosts matches at his farm every Sunday from May to October. He sometimes allows nonprofits and charities to use the matches as fundraisers; a few years after the first Beauty Becomes You event at Chukkar Farm, he told O’Neil about the unique quandary faced by elite polo ponies as they start to age.

“Their edge is so finely tuned and if the horse loses just a little speed, they’re no use to a high-goal player,” Cashin said. Still, he thought, those same ponies could be of great use to the lower-ranked players who frequent Chukkar Farm.

All it took was persuading higher-level players to donate their aging ponies to Beauty Becomes You Foundation, which is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. O’Neil, in turn, boards them at Chukkar Farm, where Cashin pays for their upkeep.

“After people learn to play polo, we have these horses that are older and very experienced that we lease to these players,” Cashin said. “It’s a win, win, win situation. A lot of higher-goal players like the idea that our place is a sort of horsey heaven for not really retired polo ponies.”

The “not really retired” ponies will be honored in a ribbon ceremony Sunday before the first “chukkar,” or period of play. Then many of them will head out to take part in the afternoon’s match, helping to drive home an important message with each pounding of their hooves.

“Timeless beauty,” O’Neil said, “should be available to everyone.”