New York ? Makeup guru Bobbi Brown wears hardly any makeup.

And despite the fact that her company makes and sells cosmetics she has the same advice for most women: Use as little makeup as possible to enhance a beauty that’s already there.

Brown says feeling good, eating well and staying healthy go a lot further toward looking good than foundation or a lipstick.

The women featured in her new book “Bobbi Brown Beauty Evolution” (HarperResource) range in age from early 20s to 101 and they’re shown with and without makeup. The photos are not retouched except for Brown’s own “glam shot” on the introduction page, and there are plenty of snapshots of her to show the reader the sometimes imperfect Bobbi Brown.

“I believe in reality. All the women in the magazines, they don’t look good like that all the time,” says Brown, who would know since she is the makeup artist of choice for many fashion shows and magazine cover shoots.

Yes, she says, celebrities do get pimples. They also get dark circles under their eyes; they just have an entire staff working to make them go away quicker.

“There is no perfection. It just doesn’t exist,” she says.

Brown’s mantra is to make the most of what you have. She uses this philosophy in her own nine-minute beauty routine, five minutes for hair and four for cosmetics.

But, she admits, she wasn’t always so fatalistic about her appearance.

“If you obsess about something as a kid, it stays with you forever, whether it’s real or not. But you have to learn to let it go and focus on other priorities. I obsessed about my tan lines, now I worry about my kids crossing the street,” she says.

Older women seem to better understand that there is more to life than a bad-hair day, Brown observes. For example, Lucia Servadio Bedarida, the 101-year-old in “Beauty Evolution,” says she thinks she looks better now than she ever did and the only cosmetics she uses are lipstick, powder, a little blush and almond oil as moisturizer.

In her new book, Bobbi

But new high-tech procedures are encouraging baby boomers to artificially slow the aging clock. “I’m worried about my generation,” says Brown. “It’s so easy to get collagen, botox and dermabrasion. I’m afraid we’ll start to look like a science project.”

Brown writes in the book that her own beauty epiphany came when she was 32, pregnant and working on a bikini photo shoot with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford. “I made a decision that I couldn’t for a second feel bad about myself because of the way they looked.”

After all, you look your best when you look like yourself, she says.

“I’m not saying love your flaws but I want you to focus on the positive. I’m not at peace with my lines, but it’s the natural process of aging.”

On this day, like on many others, Brown wears her hair down, a neutral lipstick and a no-fuss outfit that includes a denim jacket, khaki pants and loafers.

Realism, simplicity and organization are at the center of Brown’s success in the fickle fashion world that often encourages women to aspire to looks they can’t possibly achieve.

“I apply makeup; I don’t paint faces,” she explains.

If she’s working on a client who wants complicated shading and outlandish colors, Brown pretends to comply but basically sticks to her own rule of “natural beauty.”

The “placebo” effect works wonders, she says with a laugh, because the client thinks she looks better and, therefore, she does.

The worst makeup “don’t” that women of all ages do is to wear the wrong colors, an error that usually can be blamed on freebie cosmetics received as a gift with a skin-care product.

And, according to Brown, another big makeup mistake is that a woman truly believes that other people really care about how she looks.

“Who cares about how you look other than you? Nobody is noticing how you look because they are so wrapped up in how they look!” she says.