Today you are nothing unless you have flawless, supple skin. Lustrous, thick, bouncy hair. Icy white teeth and breath so fresh it cryogenically freezes your date to the couch. (Take that, Fear-of-Calling-Back Man!)
Never mind that things are even worse for women. As more and more straight guys get “queer eye-tized,” I fear that it sets the bar even higher for girls, grooming-wise. I’m all for my man having clean teeth and fingernails, but I gotta tell you, sometimes a little butt fuzz is just about all that separates me from my favorite ape.
My friend Lori recently said, “Men are the new women.” Then what, dear God, are the old women expected to be? Every time I turn around, it feels like there’s some horrid new procedure or potion that I never knew I needed in order to be well put-together.
I am the kind of person who derives her beauty routine from what’s on sale at the all-night Walgreen’s and how much time is left at the end of the day. If I were to write a beauty book, its title might be something like Fifteen Bucks & Fifteen Minutes: How to Blindly Stab Your Way to Beauty—Some of the Time!
Some days I moisturize, some days I tone. Some days I pluck when I should really be exfoliating, and Lord knows, I’m doing it all wrong. I’ll pay for it later, unless I pay for someone to help me with it now. Either way, I’ll pay.
Every woman knows that achieving a “natural” glow for a night out can easily take two hours and involve ten different shades of powder, ranging subtly from champagne to mochachino. Somehow, this doesn’t bother most of us. We’ve accepted it. We even purport to enjoy it. Who doesn’t like to kick back, drink a glass of wine, and slather our scaly, tired feet with a microwavable packet of peppermint-oil sloughing mud? (Feels refreshing! Like you’re dancing on coals in hell!) You know, maybe round out the night drunkenly counting pores while gaping into a lighted, magnified mirror. A little “me time.”
Undoubtedly, this is the seed of narcissistic desperation that eventually gives way to total self-absorption implosion. Or at the very least, complete body hairlessness. I’m no expert, but stay with me here, I’ve got a theory. If you look at something long enough, its meaning is pliable. Sometimes your makeup mirror is like those holographic mind-bender posters. Stare in it for too long, and you see David Gest staring back at you. Next thing you know, you’ve got a $10,000 Visa bill, six weeks of unpaid post-op recuperation time, and Melanie Griffith’s upper lip.
Personally, my biggest beauty beef is that I’m at that “tween” stage of life where the lines around my eyes don’t disappear anymore when I stop smiling, and yet I have just about as much acne as your average tenth-grader. I’ve been to see the dermatologist and the pimples just keep popping up in all the same spots. My next step is to see a priest, because it seems that my chin is possessed. Once the holy man wrests the demon pustules from my visage, perhaps then, with a clear face, a clear heart and mind will follow.
Or maybe the curse of boils has been visited upon me by the Big Kahuna himself—as a reminder to take care of myself, but not put too much stock in what is only surface politics. Those fifteen minutes at the end of the day for me might be better spent cultivating attributes like integrity and kindness to others. Girlfriends, any stylist worth his weight in false eyelashes can tell you that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly—now that’s an inside job.
Leave a Reply Cancel reply