"Growing Eden": Author Q&A

One of my favorite things about blogging (back when I was doing it regularly—which I'll go back to doing in March once my first draft is finished, I swear!) has been meeting some fantastic bloggers who ceaselessly bring new perspectives to this big loose conversation we're having on beauty, women, feminism, appearance, and the like. Specifically, getting to know one of the brightest body image bloggers out there, Kate Fridkis of Eat the Damn Cake, has been a delight—a delight made all the greater when I learned that she recently published her first book. 

Growing Eden, an interior chronicle of her pregnancy, diverges from body image but is wholly aligned with one of her larger themes: womanhood, and exactly what that means, personally and collectively. Being grateful for all the opportunities we have today that our grandmothers didn't; feeling constrained by the sheer number of opportunities out there. Wanting to be seen, yet feeling relief when her pregnant body—"the promise of motherhood"—temporarily excused her from being seen in a sexual light. Believing in commitment to community, yet not being excluded from little vipers of envy that can accompany being a part of a larger entity. The book is about femininity as much as it is about motherhood or pregnancy—and more important, it's a beautifully written treat. Fridkis has always been one of those writers whose thoughts inspire wanderings of my own, so I was pleased when she agreed to do a Q&A about Growing Eden with me here. For an excerpt, visit Eat the Damn Cake.

Given that you're a body image blogger, it's particularly interesting that you initially seemed to almost not trust your body to do what it did, like, "I can't really be pregnant..."—and then your body really did go and "betray" you with the morning sickness. In what ways do you feel like trust, pregnancy, and body image are interconnected?

My body definitely betrayed me in the beginning of my pregnancy, when I learned that “morning sickness” sometimes means “spending every day on the bathroom floor.” I think my brain thought I was dying. After that, my body shocked me by getting huge. I didn’t feel like myself, I felt like I was trapped inside a pregnant woman’s body. And then, just as that was becoming normal, I had to somehow push this terrifyingly large baby out. I didn’t want to do that. I really didn’t want to. But I had no choice. The whole thing was an exercise in being out of control. And the whole thing was an exercise in what my body is capable of, regardless of how I feel about it. My body turned out to be stronger than I’d ever known. It was a sneaky machine, just following its ancient program. And in the end, I was fine. Everything was fine. My body knew what it was doing, even when what it was doing was extreme or gross or enormous or horribly painful. My body made a perfect baby, even though I only ate Kraft mac and cheese and iron pills for a solid trimester. My body proved itself to me in spectacular ways. It proved how functional as opposed to decorative it really is. Which seems like it should be self-evident, but definitely hasn’t been for me. And all of this was totally normal. My body is just a normal body.

I think there’s a lot of pressure on women to have bodies that are exceptional. That are “better” than normal. That go beyond. Fitter, leaner, boobier, more dramatic, tighter, you know. I’ve definitely wanted to look “better” than normal. Better than myself. But it turned out, with my pregnancy and the birth of my baby, that normal was exactly what I needed to be. It was awesome that I was ordinary. And my ordinary body was awesome.

I think if I have another kid, I’ll go in trusting my body a lot more. I also hope I don’t have to barf as much, because that was really bad and I am still mad at my body for that part. Seriously, some women don’t even get sick. What the hell.

Ambition and reevaluating exactly what it means is one of the main themes of "Growing Eden", and it made me think of the ways that figurative hunger (for accolades, accomplishments, etc.) and literal hunger are often connected—i.e. many women displace larger forms of yearning onto their bodies. Do you feel like your interest in having a "successful" life as you frame it in the book and your interest in body image are related? If so, in what ways?

Sometimes I think that success and thinness are wrapped around each other so tightly that it’s hard, as a woman, to picture one without the other. So that this terrible thing happens: When you’re sure you’re failing or falling behind in your life you might think, “at the very least I should be thinner.” Or when you’re sure you’re getting ahead in your life you might think, “but I should still be thinner, to really make this work.”

For me, food hasn’t always been the enemy of success, but beauty has always been mixed up in my vision of it. When I was a cocky little girl, I assumed I was pretty because I assumed I was smart. Those things went together in my head. I knew beauty was important, especially for girls, so I just figured I had it, since I was confident that I had the important things. Having that assumption interrupted seriously messed with me, and when I felt worst about my appearance I also felt like I was failing as a whole person. It was hard to separate the rest of me from the way I looked. Later, coming out of that (long) phase, I wanted to succeed enormously in my career almost to make up for my appearance. I imagined that at least I would be able to impress people with my shiny, exciting life, even if they might not think I looked good. And of course, I wasn’t thinking any of this very consciously. It was just floating around in the background as I worked frantically through the weekends or looked in the mirror in the morning. Oy vey. How exhausting. That whole dance, back and forth, between beauty and career. What I was really afraid of the whole time was being irrelevant. Of being forgettable and meaningless. Of not being worth noticing for any reason. And it’s interesting, as I’ve learned to slowly, slowly forgive myself for not looking the way I’d like to look, I’ve also become more forgiving towards my career goals. I guess forgiveness is big like that.

Right now, I feel lucky to have the chance to be a writer. Which is not to say that I’m not ambitious. But ambition without appreciation is kind of like body dysmorphia—you never think you’re good enough. Convincing myself that I’m already good enough is probably one of the most critical missions of my life, and it’s interesting that it’s only really started to happen since I’ve been writing about body image in an effort to convince other girls and women that they are already good enough, too.

I loved the bit about how you felt like your pregnancy was a form of armor against sexual attention, and I'm wondering about whether that feeling of feeling somehow shielded against (here it comes) the male gaze has lingered since Eden's birth.

Yay! The male gaze! This feels delightfully classic. But seriously. Yes—it has lingered. Because now I’m a mom, and there’s a baby strapped to my body in a dorky Baby Bjorn carrier, and she’s bobbing around with her silly baby face under a giant fuzzy hat with bear cub ears and she’s drooling everywhere. In other words, my body is hidden under all of that. In other words, I am blatantly unavailable. 

And also no—because my body looks weirdly the same in clothes as it did before I was pregnant. So when I go out without the baby, suddenly I am transported back in time. And I look around and I think, “No one knows…” They don’t know that I am forever changed. That I am forever someone’s parent now. Instead I just look like some chick waiting for the C train in the same jeans and boots as every other woman.

But also yes—because I feel different, no matter what, about the way I am in my clothes, and about the way I am under people’s eyes. It’s hard to explain. I’m thinking about it and just sitting here trying to put it into words. OK, I’m bad at thinking, I’m just going to write: I am into my own body these days. Because I am so surprised by it. I can’t believe it swelled into such a dramatic new shape and then transformed again, exposing my hips and the curve of my ribcage so that I saw them in a way I hadn’t seen them before. I feel sexy for looking the way I always looked anyway. I feel sexy because I didn’t know what to expect and then I was too distracted to care and now my body fits into real pants again, and that’s exciting. I sort of expect men to look at me and appreciate the way I look, because I am appreciating it. And at the same time, I don’t give a shit what they think, for maybe the first time. So when I’m walking alone (which is still rare) I am just enjoying the freedom, and enjoying my body, and if anyone is gazing, let them gaze. I’m not even looking around. I just want to get on the C train and go.

That’s the best I can explain it.

You have a part in the book about how one of the first thoughts you had after finding out your child was a girl was, "What will she look like?"—a somewhat forbidden thought for we feminists who are supposed to be all about so many other things, larger forms of power and place in the world, etc. What was it like for you to recognize that that was one of your initial impulses, to wonder about her looks specifically as a daughter?

It sucked. I was mad at myself. And I was mad at the world, for being a place that makes beauty so important for girls that I would even have that thought. I was embarrassed, too. I didn’t want to tell anyone (so of course, I eventually wrote about it). It suggested that I had my priorities all wrong. It suggested that I am vain and lame and think appearances are the most important thing. No, no! I wanted to yell at the imaginary people who would lob that criticism at me, if I told them, It’s not like that! I think she should be able to be anything she wants! Feminism! Woman power! She is probably going to be a brilliant mathematician! But I just don’t want her to suffer because of this stupid thing that happens to girls. I don’t want her to waste her time. I don’t want her to get distracted by her surface and lose time that could be devoted to what really matters about her.

Most of all, I wanted to know what my daughter looked like because I had this desperate urge to make sure she didn’t look like me. It wasn’t exactly rational. It was a primal rush of emotion, and in that moment, I wished more than anything that she would be better than me in every way, beginning with her appearance. I didn’t want her to have my struggles. I wanted her struggles to be better, less embarrassing. Less petty-seeming. I wanted her to be less vulnerable.

It’s not true, though. Even if she ends up looking just like me, she will always be herself, and her goals and battles and vulnerabilities and confidences will be different from mine.

And now that I know her, in person—now that she’s real instead of theoretical, it feels different. I’m actually working on a little piece about how proud I sometimes feel of the way I look because of the way she looks like me.

_____________________________________

Growing Eden is available at Amazon, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Google Play, and Kobo.

The Power of Glamour

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion, by Virginia Postrel

At my very first interview for a magazine job, the executive editor of a now-defunct women’s magazine asked what periodicals I read, and I answered with what I thought would be the right smart-girl answer—The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and a magazine that was little-known at the time, Bitch. “I notice there are no women’s magazines on that list,” she said. (Bitch is indeed a magazine about and largely for women, but it’s hardly on the same shelf as Cosmo.) I stammered out something about choosing a “broader focus” for my reading material, the interviewers smiled politely, and, as you have guessed, I did not get the job.

I didn’t tell them the actual reason I didn’t read women’s magazines: They’re bad for you, right? I mean, that’s what I’d learned in women’s studies, and even if you’ve never taken a women’s studies class, you know the gist of the argument here: Women feel worse after just three minutes of looking at ladymags, the size of the average fashion model is size 0 or 2 but the average American woman wears a size 12, etc. (You might ask why I wanted to work at a women’s magazine if I believed all this, and it’s because I was naive enough and arrogant enough to believe that all the industry needed was one solid feminist comme moi and everything would change. Anyway.)

Over the years, my thinking on women’s magazines has become far more nuanced and ambivalent, but a core juxtaposition has remained: If women’s magazines make women feel so bad about themselves, why do we continue to buy them? And glamour is part of the answer. Not glamour as in the magazine title, nor glamour as many of us conceive of it—say, marcel waves, rubies, and sleek gowns on the red carpet—but rather glamour as articulated and explored in Virginia Postrel’s latest, eminently readable book, The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion. Rather than merely musing on glamour, Postrel sets out to define it, and in doing so weaves not only a history of glamour but the parameters that allow the concept to encompass everything from Jean Harlow to wind turbines, Angelina Jolie to train windows, James Bond to candy wrappers. Glamour here is neither an aesthetic nor a convention, but a nonverbal rhetoric that Postrel likens to humor, “a form of communication that elicits a distinctive emotional response.”

Under the definition laid out in The Power of Glamour, in order to be glamorous—as opposed to charismatic, opulent, beautiful, luxurious, sexy, or romantic, all of which are frequently confused with glamour—any given person or thing needs to meet a certain set of criteria. Something glamorous must give form to an otherwise formless longing or desire; it must deploy a degree of mystery, illusion, and grace that vanishes once it shifts from the glamorous to the familiar. But the factor that resonates the most with me as far as the ladymag conundrum is a degree of identification. In order to find something glamorous, we need to see it as representing a world that we identify with—or rather, that we would identify with if only. 

Postrel cites Star Trek as an example of something glamorous, which might strike many as absurd, given its distinct lack of glamorous tropes. But it was this example that cemented for me the relationship between glamour and the viewer—and if you had memories of your 11-year-old loner brother sitting on the couch in his Star Trek ensign uniform, staying up late to finish his own handwritten Next Generation scripts, you’d understand too. A bit of an outcast at that age but with a longing for community and quiet appreciation of the skills he had to offer the world, my brother couldn’t wholly identify with life aboard the starship Enterprise, but he saw enough of its world in himself—and he saw enough of himself in the values of that world—that it became far more than mere entertainment to him, even if he couldn’t spell out why. Star Trek wasn’t remotely glamorous to me, but it was to him. 

When I think of my brother’s longing today, I’m struck by how much he yearned to truly identify with that world (even though, like all chimera of glamour, it was a world that couldn’t exist). In a certain light, his obsession with Star Trek becomes heartbreaking: a child wanting so badly to live in a world where he’d have a place that he literally wrote it himself when the prewritten fantasy ran out. But I also see it as an indicator of the ways he was thriving. He took up trombone because that’s what Commander Riker played. He learned how to save his child’s income in order to buy entrance to Trekker conventions once my parents became exasperated with the constant ticket requests. He was writing entire hourlong performance scripts—a passion that stuck around long enough for him to host a radio theater show today. You could say Star Trek held up an unattainable ideal that he’d never be able to join—or you could say it spurred him to better himself. Both can be fallouts of glamour.

As a feminist writer who wants women to feel as emotionally whole as possible, I’ve spent my fair share of time fretting over idealized media images of unattainable beauty. But in writing about beauty and in talking to dozens of women about the role looks play in their lives, my mind-set has slowly shifted over the years. I can no longer believe that women are such passive, robotic consumers as to continue to buy women’s magazines if they just make us feel like crap—nor do I naively believe that women bathe in these images because we feel fantastic while doing so. Looking at the question of idealized images through the lens of Postrel’s articulation of glamour, there’s a more satisfying conclusion here: We are drawn to images of idealized beauty not out of self-loathing but out of longing; we are compelled by images not only because we compare ourselves to them but because we identify with them. If we didn’t identify with those images to some degree—even a whisper of one—they would cease to have any resonance with us. Yet if we identified too much, we’d have less to strive for.

Let’s not be confused about what identification means here: Not that we see ourselves as easily stepping into the world of an image, but that we see potential for us to do so. We may perceive glamorous objects as an entrée into that world (hence the desire for that shade of lipstick, that style of ring, that color on the soles of our shoes), but it’s not the object we want so much as the life it promises. Some part of that life rings true to us, if only true with possibilities instead of realities. Some part of it reflects our own vision of ourselves—our better, ideal selves as seen through the looking-glass, sure, but it’s us in that looking-glass either way.

“By tendering the promise of escape and transformation, glamour feeds on both hope and hardship,” writes Postrel. The specific forms of hardship she’s referring to are more concrete than bodily discontent: Women of the 1930s being sentenced to domestic drudgery; gay men of the 1980s at risk of violence, self-harm, and AIDS. But the idea extends to the question of women, images, and self-image. Much criticism has been aimed toward glamour in this regard: By preying upon our vulnerabilities, glamour stirs a want that a handy variety of products and services are ready to fill. (Or attempt to fill; once we’ve inhabited the promise of any specific glamour, an item/person/place ceases to be glamorous per se.) Indeed, glamour is an effective tool in advertising because of its power to exacerbate desire. But a narrow focus on the darker side of that desire does two things. First, it allows us to forget that glamour stokes hope, which in turn can spur positive action: The cinematic glamour of the 1930s allowed housewives to envision a world where they weren’t their own servants; vogue balls of the 1980s allowed gay men a temporary space of transformation and acceptance. Similarly, while I’m not about to argue that a photograph of, say, a 14-year-old runway model is going to spur positive action in most of us, the world we enter when we gaze upon images of idealized beauty is...well, it’s ideal. It’s fantasy—and the more we remember that it’s fantasy, the better off we’ll be. In fact, a study from 2010 shows that viewers of images of idealized beauty report higher self-esteem when they’re prompted to see the images as fantasy, not as a reflection of reality. Still, we respond to fantasy because it reflects something we may genuinely long for in our lives—after all, there are dozens of ways a public image of a woman might register as “ideal,” yet we only respond to those that stir something inside us. Gwyneth Paltrow, Dita Von Teese, and Beyoncé offer entirely different aesthetics, and yet they’re all forms of a certain type of ideal. And depending on which (if any) of these ideals resonates with us—and which we find most glamorous—we may take different routes toward embodying the sort of life we aspire to. Can we take that aspiration too far? Yes, yes, of course, and there’s plenty of excellent work out there chronicling how. But aspiration can inspire movement, and movement can inspire change. 

Second, looking only at the negative consequences of aspiration allows us to erroneously believe that glamour and imagery create want, instead of merely exacerbating it. “[Critics] imagine that if glamour disappeared, so would dissatisfaction—that, for example, women would not long to be young and beautiful if there were no cosmetic ads or movie stars,” writes Postrel. “But glamour only works when it can tap preexisting discontent, giving otherwise inchoate longings an object of focus.” Vogue magazine didn’t manufacture women’s desire to be beautiful. But it gave form to that desire with skilled imagery that allowed the reader to create a story from what was presented on the pages. (A story in which she herself is the protagonist, of course.) 

I don’t mean to say that Vogue—or any other image outlet—should be cast as aspirational in a positive way for women, or that those who feel harmed by idealized imagery should just learn to suck it up like the people who derive joy from those same images. But I am saying that the question of these outlets should be examined through a critical—and feminist—lens, outside of the usual talk of self-esteem and body image and women’s health and all that. A treatise on glamour may appear apolitical, and it can be read that way without sacrificing our understanding, but we can also use it to ask larger questions that then become political. Glamour is not inherently feminine, yet its iconography often features women, harvesting the old cliché of how “men want to be with her, and women want to be her.” If so many images are of women, what does that say about what we as a culture aspire to, or what we as consumers and individuals find to be “preexisting discontent”? When we find ourselves transfixed by an image, a longing, what does that tell us about our own desires?

Indeed, part of the riddle here lies in Vogue itself, ever an icon of glamour. Despite its reputation as highbrow and snooty, Vogue has readers whose median household income is actually lower than that of its Condé Nast sisters Glamour, Self, and Lucky. It’s a comfortable number, to be sure, but it’s interesting that a magazine featuring $280 face cream appeals to the person of more modest means than does a magazine that features $28 pleather skirts. The lofty aspirational quality of Vogue may well be less appealing to those who are slightly closer to living in that world (and, of course, the magazine itself isn’t as exclusive as its reputation—not only does it feature plenty of trends accessible to the hoi polloi, but it can, after all, be purchased by anyone with a spare six dollars). This may be my fantasy, but I’ve come to picture the average Vogue reader as being much like the distant cousin who gave me my first-ever copy of it: a schoolteacher living on a farm in Ohio who simply liked to escape into the elite world of Vogue for one afternoon each month. I imagine the magazine spoke to the part of her that wasn’t a schoolteacher, that didn’t get up at 5 a.m. to tend to sheep, even as she treasured those aspects of her life. I hesitate to say it represented a vision of her life “if only,” for she appeared plenty content. But perhaps it represented a vision of a life she might have wanted had her life been, say, 20 degrees different than it actually was.

It’s also worth noting that Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, was recently tapped to revamp some of the company’s other titles. Lucky went under a Wintour-led overhaul, and Glamour is in the midst of the same, with two key image-makers leaving the magazine in recent weeks. Wintour’s talents lie in finding the balance between malcontent and inspiration, identification and aspiration. That is, titles aside, her talents lie in finding none other than glamour.

"Fractals" by Joanna Walsh: Short Story and Giveaway

When people ask me what I like to read, the first word out of my mouth is usually "nonfiction." My reasoning is simple: I like to read about what I like to write about, namely physical appearance and its intersection in women's lives. And the open-minded part of me cringes to admit this, but: I've tended to believe that fiction isn't the place for this. Sure, the occasional piece might illuminate an aspect of women's stories, but on the whole, I'll stick with my nonfiction shelf—Wolf, Berger, Sontag, Etcoff, Steinem, and so on.

Had Fractals, Joanna Walsh's new collection of short stories from 3:AM Publishing, been published earlier than this October, my answer would have changed earlier as well. I'd mistakenly conflated nonfiction with truth, entirely forgetting that fiction allows us to tell a different sort of truth—particularly about internal experiences. Like how, as with Walsh's characters, we might keep ourselves groomed for an absent beloved we privately know will never arrive, or how we make silent bargains about our looks ("The man with the steak looks at my legs which gives me permission to look at the message he is typing into his mobile phone. I cannot see it as the glass reflects. I feel cheated."). I knew from my first encounter with Walsh's work—an illustrated look at five female authors, and how their self-presentation plays into their reputation—that she was as intrigued by beauty as I was. Fractals expands her thoughts on the matter, with a direct focus on how the rituals of womanhood affect not only how we're seen by the world, but how we see ourselves. Her characters are keenly—sometimes painfully—aware of how they present themselves visually, treating clothing as a talisman, as a reaction to life events, as a confirmation of who they think they want to be.

When I asked the U.K.-based Walsh how she tailors her own choice of clothing to her state of mind, she had this to say: "I haven't, so far, done any sort of public appearance (and I love doing readings) in a skirt or dress. I feel more authoritative in androgynous clothes, which I know is not a very worthy feeling as it's got to be to do with kowtowing to the way I intuit 'feminine' and 'masculine'-looking people are perceived. But there's also an element (another anxiety) of making writing look like 'proper' work—manual work even. I occasionally wear a boiler suit to read, and I always feel very comfortable. I think of the Surrealists in their suits: artists and writers who refused to look 'bohemian', who refused to make the distinction between what they did and less 'artistic' jobs. So when working at home I rarely stay in pyjamas. However I do own, and wear, a variety of pretty dresses..."

Enjoy "Fin de Collection," one of the stories from Fractals, below—and leave a comment on this entry to enter to win a copy of the collection from 3:AM. Winner will be chosen by random number generator; leave a comment by 11:59 p.m. EST November 12 to enter.

*     *     *

A friend told me to buy a red dress in Paris because I am leaving my husband.

The right teller can make any tale, the right dresser can make any dress look good. Listen to me carefully: I am not the right teller.

Even to be static in Saint Germain requires money. The white stone hotels charge so much a night just to stay still, just so as not to loose their moorings and roll down their slips into the Seine. So much is displayed in the windows in Saint Germain: so little bought and sold. No transactions are proposed that are not so weighty for buyer and seller as to be life-changing. But, for those who can afford them, they no longer seem to matter.

The women of the quarter are all over 40. They smell of new shoe leather. I walk the streets with them, licking the windows. Are we only funning that we could be what is on display? It is impossible to see what kind of women could inhabit those dresses but some do, some must. Nobody here is wearing them.

Amongst the women I am arrogant. I retain my figure without formal exercise. I retain my position as a wounded woman like something in stone, infinitely moving and just a little silly. In order to retain my position I must be wounded constantly. This is painful, but it is a position I have become used to.

We turn into Le Bon Marché department store, the women and I, Vogue heavy in our shoulder bags.

There is nothing like Le Bon Marché if you are rich and beautiful. But if you are not rich or beautiful, it doesn’t matter. The store has its own rules. It is divided into departments: fashion, food, home. It is possible to find yourself in the wrong department but nothing bad can happen here and, although you may be able to afford nothing, it costs nothing to look.

Le Bon Marché is always the same and always different, like those postcards where the Eiffel Tower is shown a hundred ways: in the sun, in fog, in sunsets, in snow. It may look different in Spring or Autumn, at Christmas or Easter, but the experience it delivers is always the same.

There are no postcards of the Eiffel Tower in the rain but it does rain in Paris, even in August. And when it rains, you can shelter in Le Bon Marché, running between the two ground-floor sections with one of its large orange paper bags suspended over your head (too short a dash to open an umbrella).

Inside is perpetual summer. Customers complaining of being too hot are forced to take off their coats beneath the stencils of artificial flowers that bloom across midwinter walls. The orange paper carrier bags are not made for real weather, either. Once wet their dye leaks onto hair, coats, and leaves orange stains on pale carpets, clothes, floorboards...

Fin de collection d’éte. In Le Bon Marché it is already Autumn. The new collections are in order. They do not privilege experience. With time they will deteriorate, unbalance, as each key piece sells out, leaving a skeleton leaf of basics, black and grey. One can commit too early of course. A key piece bought nearly in style will merely foreshadow the version available when the style is at its height.

In 35 degree heat, we bury our faces in wool and corduroy. We long for frost, we who have waited so long for summer. To change clothes is to take a plunge, to holiday. Who cares if we cannot afford to leave Paris. In the passerelle, the walkway between the store’s two buildings, a tape-loop breeze, the sound of water, photographs of a beach...

There is something about my face in the mirrors that catch it. Even at a distance it will never be right again, not even to a casual glance. Beauty: it’s the upkeep that costs, that’s what Balzac said, not the initial investment.

Je peux vous aider?

The salesgirl asks the fat woman with angel’s wings tattooed across her back. She mouths, Non, and walks, with her thin companion, into the passarelle, suspended.

The first effect of abroad is strangeness. It makes me strange to myself. I experience a transfer, a transparency. I do not look like these women. I want to project these women’s looks onto mine and with them all the history that has made these women look like themselves and not like me.

From time to time I change my mind and sell my clothes. I sell the striped ones and buy spotted ones. Then I sell the spotted ones and buy plaid. Does it get me any closer? At the checkout, the thin girl in her checked jacket looks more appropriate than me, though her clothes are cheaper. This makes me angry. How did her look slip by me? I was always too young. And now I am too old.

I cannot forgive them. I forgive only the beauties of past eras: the pasty flappers, the pointed New Look-ers. They are no longer beautiful. They cannot harm me now. These two are not even the beautiful people. It’s more that they’re so much less unbeautiful than everyone else. Please remember, we are in Le Bon Marché. Plunge into the metro if you want to encounter the underground of the norm.

Even your other women seemed tame until I saw them through your eyes, until I saw the attention you paid them. I no longer know the value of anything. And if you do not see me, I am nothing. From the outside I look together. I forget that I am really no worse than anyone else. But how can I go on with nobody, with no reflection? And how, and when, and where can I be inflamed by your glance? I can’t be friends with your friends. I can’t go to dinner with you, don’t even want to.

But why does the fat woman always travel with the thin woman? Why the one less beautiful with one more beautiful? Why do there have to two women, one always better than the other?

Je peux vous aider?

Non. There are no red dresses in Le Bon Marché. It isn’t the dress: it’s the woman in the dress. (Chanel. Or Yves Saint Laurent.) Parisiennes wear grey, summer and winter: they provide their own colour. I have learned to imitate them. Elegance is refusal. (Chanel. Or YSL. Or someone.) To leave empty-handed is a triumph.

In any case come December the first wisps of lace and chiffon will appear and with them bottomless skies reflected blue in mirror swimming pools.

To other people, perhaps, I still look fresh: to people who have not yet seen this dress, these shoes, but to myself, to you, I can never re-present the glamour of a first glance.

To appear for the first time is magnificent.

______________________________________

Joanna Walsh is a writer, illustrator, and artist. She draws and writes for The Guardian, The Times, Metro, The Idler, FiveDials, 3:AM, Berfrois.com, Necessaryfiction.com, and The White Review, amongst others. She has created large-scale artworks for the Tate Modern and The Wellcome Institute and has developed immersive theatre/games events in collaboration with Hide and Seek and Coney Agencies, as well as games she runs herself. You can read her blog at Badaude, and follow her on Twitter here.

Photo: Wayne Thomas

Hi Honey, I'm Home: Makeup and Cohabitation

I only needed one of these to move my makeup collection, mkay?

So, yes, I moved recently; only days ago. Specifically, I moved not just apartments but living situations—my gentleman friend and I decided to move into a new apartment together. I’ve lived alone for 12 years, so while this was a decidedly positive development, there’s also an element of adjustment going on. I’m not used to having someone else in the space I call my own, except for specific, defined periods of time—dinner, drinks. Even a lazy afternoon is just that, an afternoon, not an indefinite stretch in which ever-elastic time is shared with another. That’s exactly why most of us move in with someone, actually—you want to spend more time with them, or you want your downtime to include more of them, or something like that.

But when we talk about moving in with someone, the words we use imply not time but space. And—news flash, folks—sharing a space with someone means...you have to share. I don’t have a problem with this on a theoretical level, but on a practical level it means recognizing that you can’t just use your space however you see fit; if your intended use of space encroaches upon what a reasonable roommate might call “their” space, you’ve gotta make concessions. And here I am talking about the bathroom.

I recognized early on that I’d have to pare down my beauty products (this after I’d done what I believed to be a “thorough purge” a couple of years ago, ha!); our new bathroom has somewhat less storage space than my old (and crammed) one, and my beauty-product : non-beauty-product ratio is roughly 8:1. As I went through my bathroom, I started asking myself on products I was waffling on, “How would I justify this to my boyfriend?” Not that he’d ask me to justify any of my stuff—it was more of a weeding technique. If I can’t justify any particular beauty product to the person whose space I am about to share, I probably don’t need it at all, right? Despite my best efforts, though, I’m guessing that 90% of the bathroom is full of my crap. His grooming accessories: two bottles of cologne, an electric razor, and a stick of deodorant. (And a shampoo three times as expensive as mine, thankyouverymuch.) Mine? Well, are we counting only the daily-use stuff on the cabinet shelves, or are we counting the “extras” stored beneath the sink, or are we going whole hog and counting things like the velcro curlers and glitter eye pencil I can’t make myself get rid of? 

Still, that’s just the concern of space. Truly, the adjustment that living together takes is indeed about time, or perhaps division of time. I’m used to time being clearly delineated: Time in public means time out of my home, time in private means time in my home. Sure, there are plenty of spaces that straddle the two—going to friends’ homes, for example—but maybe that example just illuminates how skewed my idea of public vs. private has become. Private time for me in the past 12 years has meant not just time out of the public sphere but time away from anyone except myself. Living with someone means an adjustment to that line of thinking.

Enter makeup: For me, one of the primary functions of makeup has been to delineate the public from the private. Virtually every time I leave the house, I’m wearing makeup, and if I’m not, it’s because the space I’m entering is something I consider a mental extension of “home”: the grocery store, for example (it’s just around the corner!), or the gym. And for the most part, that means that I’d be putting on makeup before seeing my boyfriend. I mean, he’s seen me plenty of times without makeup, but the default is certainly mascaraed. Despite the fact that he’s enough of a “home” for me to want to create a literal home with him, being with him still gave me enough of a toehold in the public sphere that I’d want to put on makeup, even if I was just having him over for the evening.

So now that one particular form of public-private life—my intimate life, my partnered life—is more fully anchored in the private sphere, makeup could fall by the wayside, according to the personal logic I believed I’d been applying. And yet there I am, every day before he comes home from work, dabbing it on, prettifying, beautifying, cosmetizing. (It could be more extreme, I suppose: I’ve heard tell of the woman who wakes up before her partner so she can scurry to the bathroom to get made-up.) Me being me, I’m sure I’ve put far too much thought into this, but there it is: I’m not fully comfortable admitting that I make a point to put on makeup before he comes home for the day, and I can’t help but wonder what it means that I’m using makeup in this manner. Is it a form not of delineating public from private but of delineating me from us—a way of making sure I don’t lose myself in the glory of The Couple?

There’s actually some shreds of evidence for that line of thought: Unmarried, cohabitating couples are more likely than married couples to have spaces in the home that are designated “alone” spaces. (Well, they were in 1974, and while cohabitation has drastically changed in social meaning since then, I do hear this concern more from unmarried friends who live with partners as opposed to married couples.) But we live in New York, and while our apartment is comfortable, the idea of “alone spaces” is nearly laughable. We have a room whose main purpose is for me to work in—still, one can technically be out of sight in a New York dwelling, but one can never be out of earshot, even olfactoryshot at times. My makeup collection is a way of carving out a physical space of designated “alone” time, sure, but it may also be a way of drawing a boundary of sorts around a mental space that’s wholly mine. Not for his benefit, but for mine: For as I write this, my boyfriend is at work, and I am without a drop of makeup, without shoes, without contact lenses. No music is playing; no other creature is in this space. When he gets home this evening, I may still be working and writing, but things will look different. I’ll be made up, glasses off, hair brushed; the sounds of his existence will flow through this space. His sounds aren’t distracting per se, but they are not sounds of the solitude I’m used to when I work. I wonder if the makeup serves as an external notification to myself: You are no longer alone. It will take time to learn how to not be alone, after more than a decade of being able to be wholly alone at any moment I choose, simply by going home. And as it has done for me before, makeup may help me through a personal transition.

I wonder how this will change as time goes by and living with someone else becomes my mental default, not a new playdate. And yes, I’m aware that for all my talk of boundaries and solitude, makeup also helps us look better, and I’m talking about my boyfriend, not a roommate—I want to look my best around him. Especially now, I admit—now, before the natural rough edges of cohabitation begin to reveal themselves. I’m not yet annoyed by any of the things that may annoy me a year from now: shoes laying about wherever he feels like taking them off, that sort of thing. And in turn, to my knowledge none of my little things have crept into his brain: inability to get anything totally clean, 12 different kinds of flours in the cupboard (down from 15, so it’s an improvement). He’s under no illusions that I’m perfect in any way, including looks-wise; it’s not like he believes my eyelashes blacken themselves. Maybe that’s exactly why I’m drawn to wearing makeup at home now, in his presence anyway: It’s not an illusion at all, but an expression, an articulation of my desire to start off this whole living-together thing at my personal best. Sometimes my personal best will mean a laser-like attention to other things (most notably work), and in those times makeup may well fall by the wayside. Right now, though, my personal best isn’t so lopsided. She writes, she edits, she exercises, she researches, she reads, she cleans. And right now, she does it looking the way she wants.

Jacqueline Madrano, Retired Homemaker and Volunteer, San Antonio

Jacqueline Madrano has served plenty of roles throughout her 80-plus years: homemaker, civic volunteer, church pianist, occasional secretary, “kitchen musician.” It’s this life experience, combined with her unique historic role as military wife in the post-WWII years—accompanying her husband, Col. Joseph Madrano, throughout his career, she raised three children in U.S. Army bases around the world—that made me want to interview her. 

Rather, those are the reasons I’d want to interview her if I didn’t know her in the capacity I do. But it’s her role as my grandmother—my impeccably put-together grandmother, without whose influence this blog might not exist—that, obviously, has left the deeper imprint upon me. Not only has she led by example through being a fashion plate, she’s also given me morsels of wisdom on fashion, beauty, and self-presentation as long as I can remember.

If you put powder over lipstick and then put on another coat, it’ll last all day, she told me when I was playing at her vanity table at age seven—my first-ever beauty tip, tucked away for years until I’d finally start wearing lipstick for real. Your hair is pretty, but it isn’t your best feature—let’s get you some bangs to show off your eyes, she said when taking me to get my first haircut that went beyond a basic trim. Every woman should have a little mad money, just for you, she said as she paid for that haircut by plucking a $20 bill from a hidden flap in her pocketbook. It wasn’t a beauty tip per se, but it was a signal to me that spending money on your appearance was a manner of self-care, a way to do something “just for you.” My mother—a beauty minimalist and second-wave feminist who sat me down with my first Barbie to show me the ways Barbie’s body and Mommy’s body were different—taught me one way to be a woman. Mimi taught me another.

That powder-over-lipstick trick is a keeper, and so are some of the other things we discussed: comfort versus beauty, vanity versus pride, and why the U.S. government cared what she wore when going bowling. In her own words:

Jacqueline Madrano and her husband, Joseph

On Fads and Comfort

I grew up very poor. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, but what clothes I did have I tried to make not the latest styles, but something that would last. As the years went on, we could afford a little more, but I’d learned what styles look best on me years earlier. So I just stayed with that style instead of whatever came in fads. I don’t care for the fads; I keep my clothes forever. Though I did have nice legs, so when the styles were short I wore them—not as short as a lot of them, some of the styles were just embarrassing! But since I knew what colors looked best on me, when I went to get new clothes, they’d go with what I already had in my closet. That really helped me in our traveling—I can take just one suitcase but have many different outfits.

I’ve had my colors done, but you really learn what works on you mostly by comments. When people would say, Oh, you really look nice today or That’s a good color for you, you pay attention. And you pay attention to what you’re comfortable in—I knew pastel shades worked for me because I was more comfortable in them. You do not have to sacrifice comfort for beauty. You have to know what is comfortable first, but then you can always fix it so it looks pretty too. I’ve heard people that you have to choose one or the other, but I’ve found it easy to do both. But the secret is knowing your style and your colors. And then if a fad works with that, well, that’s fine.

But some fads turn out not to be fads. Have you tried mineral makeup? I love it; that’s what I wear now. So much quicker, so much cleaner. It goes on so easily and you can just brush it off if you don’t get it on right the first time. I think it makes you look more like you. After 80 years you know who you are. You want to look like who you are. I don’t like to see a mature woman with a lot of makeup on. It makes me think they don’t like this age, that they want to look younger. And it makes them look the other way around.

On Pride

I took a ladies’ night out at a basketball game with our minister’s wife and my friend Carolyn. A handsome man—he wasn’t a young man but he wasn’t an old man either, tall, very handsome—came up to us and he put his arms around us and he says, “Ladies, don’t be frightened, but I just want to tell you that you are the best-looking women at the game tonight.” We weren’t dressed up, but we were neat. He said, “Most of the women here don’t even try to be neat, and to see somebody like you—I just had to tell you.” We felt honored because we were old women! Well, Carolyn’s not as old, but for him to stop and tell us that was really something. Then he just went on his way. He wasn’t trying to flirt or anything; he was just being honest.

But it’s true: People don’t care how they look anymore. It’s fine if you want to do that at home, but I think being neat when you go out shows that you’re proud, that you’re proud of living.

And I think when you don’t make that effort, it means you don’t care. I’ve seen that more and more and it bothers me—people coming to church every Sunday and they’re not neat, their hair isn’t combed. It’s bothersome. I feel like it shows they’ve lost their pride. I look good, and I don’t want people to think I look good just to be looked at, or that I have to be looked at, but if it happens, it happens.

I probably have too much pride. I say that because so many women are happy without things I’m miserable without. I have to have a perm! Usually I’d go to the beauty shop once a week and get my hair fixed, and [my husband] Joe never complained about that. He complained about other things but he never complained about my going to the beauty shop. In fact, he said, Well, how are you going to work this? But when I was busy getting Joe well last year when he was ill, I hated to leave him so I couldn’t drive across town to have my hair fixed once a week. It got really bad. I didn’t let it bother me because I had to do these things, but after he got feeling better that’s the first thing I did, went out to get a perm, got myself looking a little better. It costs money, but I feel like it’s worth it, and Joe does too. It makes me behave better; I’m happier, so I’m not cross. And I don’t feel sorry for myself. But I’ve always been a little vain. Or maybe just proud—I do think of other people, maybe that’s the difference. 

Jacqueline and Col. Madrano, 1973

On Being a Military Wife

I think the military has a lot to do with my pride. When we were stationed overseas the first time, in Japan, not long after the war had ended, and the first time in Germany, there was military policy about how we could dress. If we went bowling, for instance, we could drive there in short short pants—we could get out of the car and bowl and get in the car and go home. But we could not stop on the way and get out of the car—they didn’t want us to be seen like that. The military wanted us to make a good impression on the people there—we wanted to show the Japanese that we were nice people after the war.  And the same in Germany. But the second time we went to Germany it wasn’t like that. We were very fortunate to be in the States when Joe went over to Vietnam, because they didn’t live on a base where people really supported the troops. People would boo the wives. They had nothing to do with it; it was their husbands, but the wives still felt a lot of pain. But because we lived here we didn’t feel that as much. I never had anyone say anything to me. 

Joe was always the commander, and I felt that as his wife if I didn’t keep myself looking nice, how could we set an example? Not that the other girls had to look nice all the time, but I wanted—it’s nice when people care. I maybe felt a little pressure for that, but I enjoyed putting on a good front. I really did. I enjoyed being overseas and meeting people from overseas and seeing their style—it was all just so interesting. 

On How to Get Over Times of Feeling Unappealing

I grew up, that’s all! I’d think to myself, Okay, Jacq, this too shall pass. And it did.

Beauty Backfire and the Placebo Effect

That's me on the left.

Apologies for the spotty appearances as of late. I have a feeling that I’ll be beginning many a blog post with variations on that line until my book deadline this spring. In this case, however, there have been two factors that have complicated my blogging schedule even more than authorship: 1) I’m moving (apartments, not cities or even neighborhoods), and 2) a recent vacation spurred by the destination wedding of a dear friend (and faithful reader! Mazel tov, C!).

It’s item #2 that was on my mind beautywise much of last week (I’ll get around to the moving-and-beauty post soon enough, and yes, there’s much to say there). Not only was it a wedding and therefore already an occasion that calls for looking one’s best, it was also a wedding at which A) my boyfriend, the bride’s brother, was one of the groomsmen, so B) I’d therefore be meeting other members of my boyfriend’s family for the first time—plus, C) he’d be looking damn good and I wanted to “match," and D) a handful of college friends I hadn’t seen in years would be in attendance. So yeah, I wanted to amplify the effort I’d normally put into my appearance for any wedding.

(At this point I could loftily say something about how weddings are one of the last cultural rites we formally observe in American society, and how therefore a certain degree of effort isn’t just self-enhancing but actually serves as a sign of respect to the happy couple—indeed, a sign of respect to the tradition of marriage itself. And I’d be accurate in pointing this out, both generally and as far as how I treated the occasion, but I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention that until the week before the wedding I’d mistakenly believed that The College Ex I Shed A Small River of Tears Over would be in attendance, and while that was literally half a lifetime ago, does it ever hurt to look your most smoldering in such a situation? No, it does not. As you were.)

Of course, even at my most high-maintenance I’m not that high-maintenance (though nobody ever thinks they’re high-maintenance, right?), so my extra effort basically meant that I was more careful than usual about what I ate beforehand so I wasn’t bloated, got a new dress for the occasion, and allotted plenty of time to make a nice updo.

But I also engaged in two bits of beauty service I don’t normally do: I got a facial, and a gel manicure.

And boy, did they backfire. I mean, maybe backfire isn’t exactly the right word: My skin did indeed look particularly good two days after the facial as promised, and the gel manicure stayed neat and shiny longer than the manicurist had told me it would. Nor is it that I was expecting miracles; I knew that though my skin might look better than usual once it had healed from the extractions, no facial would turn me into Helen of Troy. But as for the facial, not only did I look hideous for 48 hours afterward—though this was to be expected, as whenever someone takes a lancet to your pores to get out all the goop there is to get, you’re going to look like hell for a bit—but I quickly broke out with an enormous zit right on my nose. True, I didn’t make it any better by fiddling with it to the point where it basically turned into an open wound. (The bride herself came to my rescue with a great beauty tip: Once it gets to that point, you should actually treat it like an open wound and use Neosporin on it. Worked like a charm!) And as far as the gel manicure, the nail polish bonded to the nail so thoroughly that when it caught a snag, the upper quarter-inch of the entire nail ripped. It didn’t tear off completely, thankfully—that is, thankfully for my “ick” threshold, not simply for vanity, as I wound up accessorizing my manicure with a waterproof Band-Aid—but it was troublesome for days, and it was nearly a week before the nail had grown out enough where I could safely clip it. (It still looks bad, but at least I’m not making myself shudder anymore.)

It all worked out fine in the end, in the sense that by the time the wedding rolled around I was able to cover the scar on my nose, and my torn fingernail failed to halt any of the festivities. (Not to mention the far more important sense of it working out fine: I was there to support the happy couple, so minor points aside, as long as I didn’t show up wearing a T-shirt with “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE” scribbled across it, the way I looked at their wedding didn’t really matter.)

But the fact that I’d considered both of these beauty services special treats—and the ways in which they each led to appearance kerfuffles that I wouldn’t have had had I not “treated” myself to them—made me wonder what was actually in it for me. 

I’m embarrassed to admit how much the facial and its associated services (microdermabrasion, take-home glycolic acid treatment, tips for the facialist and her assistant) cost, but suffice to say it was about as much as the plane ticket to the actual wedding. (I figured if I was going to get a facial for the first time in a decade, I may as well go to the best—for research purposes only—so I went all fancy-lady and went to somewhere I read about in fancy-lady mag W when I freelanced there for a minute and a half a few years ago.) This is hardly a claim that I was somehow ripped off, though; nobody needs a facial, or a gel manicure.

When it comes to extravagant services like a facial, it’s the ultimate placebo effect: You only get out of it what you think you’ll get out of it. Yeah, my skin looked great after it healed, but I expected it to look great; it’s wholly possible that the facial itself had nada to do with it, my hopes alone providing whatever glow I believe I saw.

But the placebo line of thinking makes me wonder whether there’s a part of me that was looking for some sort of backfiring, even punishment, for having been so extravagant in the first place. I mean, I don’t think I subconsciously made myself get a pimple or rip my fingernail. (Wouldn’t that be a great beauty article, though? “Think yourself into a breakout? Now think your way out!”) It’s just that as much as I argue for beauty work as a stand-in for so many other things—self-care, articulation of emotions and desires, creation of a public persona—there’s forever a part of me that feels a good deal of guilt about doing much appearance-wise beyond a basic clean-and-moisturize routine.

There’s child starvation and obstetric fistula and Roe v. Wade is basically null in much of the United States and domestic violence and Syria and people rolling around limblessly on skateboards in Vietnam because of Agent Orange and I’m getting a fucking facial? Bitch, please. I’m descended from Puritans—many of us are in this country, if not literally—and though the strict moralism of that time has faded, its framework has proven sturdy enough to survive.

Perhaps our collective fascination with and disdain of shamelessly vain people—the socialites who get those fancy-lady facials all the time and think nothing of it, the Kardashians of the world—is less about the vain part of the equation and more about the shameless part of it. Maybe I could only let myself indulge so heartily in the first place if I made some sort of connection—valid or not—between my indulgences and the fable-like postscripts I’ve attached to each. In the end, I wound up laughing about the whole thing, and it is sort of funny in a moral-of-the-story kind of way: I’ve been skipping my monthly massages since May in order to pay for this one stupid facial, telling myself that I could exchange one form of self-care for another, when I full well knew better. A massage is truly therapeutic; a facial...well, I mean, I’ve had one before, and while it was nice, I also knew the its benefits wouldn’t equal what I receive from a massage. And as for the gel manicure, I’m still paying the price in the form of ridiculously dried-out nails from the acetone removal. (Why are gel manicures popular? They lead to ruin, I tell you! Ruin!) I don’t have any grand pronouncement here, other than to admit that I fell into the consumerist trap of believing that if I just spent the right amount of money and did the right amount of research and took the right amount of effort, something I don’t actually believe is worth the time/money/effort would somehow become worth the time/money/effort. I’d forgotten that the placebo effect only works if you believe it will. A sugar pill won’t get rid of your toothache if you know it’s a Tic-Tac all along.

You're Not Pretty Enough: Excerpt and Giveaway

The thing about You're Not Pretty Enough, storyteller Jennifer Tress's alternately hilarious and searing memoir, is that it's not really about being pretty. In fact, save for the argument with her then-husband that the book's title comes from—uttered unbelievably (except totally believably) in the midst of discussions about his inattentiveness and infidelity—prettiness doesn't make much of a star turn at all. Yet that's exactly why I found it valuable, because the thing about not feeling pretty enough is that...it's not really about being pretty either. It's about being enough. 

When Tress launched her website, she'd titled it You're Not Pretty Enough because of that stinging exchange with her then-husband. She soon noticed that search terms that landed people at her site were those of people looking for comfort in the midst of feeling...well, not pretty enough. And so in addition to compiling her personal tales, which showcase the best of what storytelling has to offer, she conceived a mission: Get women talking in a more thoughtful manner about appearance. (Lo and behold, that's exactly the mission I've got here! You see why I'm pleased to feature Tress.) I asked her to expand more on the "enough" part of "you're not pretty enough," and this is what she had to say:

"'Enough' is such a weird qualifier, isn’t it? But it’s one that we use a lot when describing our dissatisfaction with ourselves or with others. Whether it be good enough, smart enough, or pretty enough—it’s all about feeling 'enough.' That we’re whole, we’re valuable. It reminds me of that old skit from Saturday Night Live with (now Senator!) Al Franken as Stuart Smalley: I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it…people like me!

Based on the work I’ve done through the You're Not Pretty Enough website, I’ve found that not feeling 'pretty enough' is often the entrée into self-esteem issues because it’s the easiest/laziest way we assess ourselves and others (which is reinforced by media and other cultural standards that we compare ourselves to). On the positive side, I also believe that beauty matters very little to most people, and to some, beauty doesn’t matter one bit. The key is for beauty to matter very little to ourselves. I want to share with you a message someone posted on the Facebook page that demonstrates this point. She says:

One statement you said has changed me. You said, "...It's the easiest and laziest way we assess ourselves." I had never thought about it this way before. I got up every morning to scrutinize my physical self. My state of mind would depend on how good I felt I looked. I'd obsess about it all day. And ultimately felt I didn't measure up, therefore I was unlovable. I was getting sick of myself. I started to walk by the mirror without looking. Then I watched the ABC story online. [Jennifer appeared on Good Morning America to talk about the "not enough" syndrome.] Never for a minute had I stopped to think to assess the things that make me, me. It does take time and effort to assess myself for other qualities and to become a better person. It's so simple. I wasn't ready, I guess. Or I was just being lazy. The next day after this mind-blowing revelation, I looked in the mirror. I saw me and I actually loved what I saw. I had been faking it for so long. I was brought to tears. Yesterday, the quality I reminded myself of is that I'm kind. Today, it's that I'm smart. In time and with some effort, from now on I will always love what I see in the mirror. 

Coming back to my own experience, I don’t think my ex was saying I wasn’t pretty, he was saying I wasn’t pretty enough. And the problem with that is I took that word 'enough' and ran with it: enough for who? For him? For society? It was the first time I really considered whether I was pretty “enough” and luckily—by simply focusing on things I like (reading, connecting with people who cared about me, doing a good job at the things I invested my time in like work, etc.)—I was able come out the other side and know: I’m more than enough.

Below is an excerpt from You're Not Pretty Enough (also available on Kindle and other outlets), and Tress is offering a signed copy to two readers. To enter, answer the same question I asked Jennifer in the comments by September 25 at 11:59 p.m.  EST, and we'll select two winners: What does the phrase "not pretty enough"—as opposed to "not pretty"—mean to you?

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The background: When I was 16, I fell head over heels in love with Jon Bon Jovi based on seeing the “Shot Through The Heart” video. I didn’t know who this guy was, but I needed to find him and meet him because I was sure once we were face to face he’d feel the same way about me. As luck would have it, a huge radio station out of Cleveland, Ohio moved its broadcast operations to my small hometown and on a dare I went there one night to meet the DJ on hand and plant some serious seeds to get me closer to Jon. It worked. One day the DJ contacted me and offered to take me to the concert in a limo (with some contest winners) to meet the band back stage. I had 8 weeks to prepare…

Operation “Make Jon fall in love with me” included the following steps:

• Lose seven pounds to get to 125
• Find the perfect outfit
• Identify all the different scenarios that could occur
• Determine and practice a response to all scenarios identified

Step one would be easy: skip the cafeteria pizza and do some of my mom’s Jane Fonda tapes. Step two required an inventory of my closet. Nothing outfit-wise struck me as just right, but I did have a white leather jacket that fit me perfectly and a pair of low, but sexy white pumps. I just needed a dress. A trip to the mall would fix that, and I found a light pink sleeveless number that went down to my knees and hugged my curves. Done.

For the last two steps, I would need to imagine all the possible ways Jon would act. For instance, if he was cocky, I imagined myself saying, “Think of all the fans who support you. You would be nothing without us. NOTHING!”  I couldn’t really imagine him being anything but lovely, but one had to prepare. I practiced my responses in the mirror until I felt I was ready.

And then the day came.

I got dressed, teased my long, permed, and frosted hair to the sky, and stepped out to enter the limo as an eighties goddess. The contest winners were two female friends in their twenties who were as psyched as I was, and we were accompanied by Cat and another DJ, Rick Michaels. The mood was giddy as we jammed out to music on the thirty-minute ride to the Richfield Coliseum on a warm May day.

Several groupies were gathered around the area where the band buses and VIP guests pulled up. Suddenly, everyone in the limo took notice that from the waist up I looked exactly like Jon, especially with hair, leather jacket, and shades. Cat suggested that I pop out of the moon roof and give the groupies a show.

“You think it’ll work?”

“Try it.”  The girls in the limo egged me on.

“OK…”  I jumped up on the seat so that my top half was showing and raised my hand with my three middle fingers folded down and waved my pinky and thumb in the classic “Rock on!” sign. The groupies went crazy. When the limo parked and I got out—obviously no longer a man, they started shouting, “FUCK YOU!”  

Heh, I thought. I’m about to meet my soul mate, so fuck YOU!

We made our way through the melee near backstage—sound guys and wires were crisscrossing us—until we arrived in a large holding room with about fifty other radio station representatives and various guests. I could hardly deal. My skin was crackling with excitement, and I sat with my hands underneath my thighs to keep from biting my nails. 

We waited. For over an hour, we waited. I barely spoke to anyone because I was there for me, and I wanted to be inside my head preparing.

Cat, noticing my tension, said, “You know, I don’t want you to be disappointed if it’s just Tico who comes out.”  Now, I loved Bon Jovi for the sum of its parts, and one of those parts was the drummer, Tico Torres. But I had not come this far to just see TICO. No fucking way. As this thought bounced around my head, I became more anxious. But then I looked down the long hallway that led to the holding room, and there was Jon walking toward us. I grabbed my camera.

It sounds cliché, but it really felt like everyone disappeared, and it was just me and him, separated only by a hundred yards. No one had noticed him yet, and I watched him walk toward the room, as if in slow motion, dressed in tight leather pants and a cut-off shirt. He was smaller than I expected—maybe five-eight and thin—and he looked tired. I could feel tears well up, and I pinched myself on the thigh to get it together. 

When he entered the room, several handlers marshaled him over to us. Apparently, as the concert sponsors, our group got first dibs. Cat and the others stood up, but I remained seated, frozen, and he stopped right at the base of my chair, shaking their hands, looking down at me, and smiling. He started to tell a funny story that I can no longer remember, and I sat there, mute. All that practice down the drain! Cat, noticing my catatonic state, decided he should step in.

“This is my friend Jen.”

“Hey, Jen,” he said, smiling warmly and extending his hand to the one that was holding the camera. Instead of simply moving the camera from one hand to the other, I dropped it and shook his outstretched hand with my mouth wide open. I didn’t even say hi. He looked at me with an expression that read Am I crazy or does she look like me? and then one of the handlers told us it was time for Jon to move to the other groups, but not before pictures were taken.

“Anyone want me to take a photo with their camera?” asked the female handler, and I momentarily regained my consciousness to hand her mine.

We stood up in a group—the concert winners to his right and me to his left—and I felt him put his arm around my shoulder. I managed to wrap my arm around his waist and willed my molecules to remember his shape so I could replay it later.

The handler took some photos with other peoples’ cameras, and when she got to mine, she said “Honey, it’s not working.”

“Huh?”

“Your camera. It’s not working.”

“No, did, um, did you try…”

“Honey, I can’t make it work, sorry,” and then she gave it back and began to corral Jon to move to the next group. I looked at him, trying to think of something brilliant to say to make him stop and realize I was not just his female, mute doppelganger.

Who is who?

“Don’t worry,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. “The station can get you a picture.”  And then he winked at me and walked on. I sat down on the chair again and watched the other groups as they showed off their gregariousness. Stupid talkers! Stupid me! 

Cat patted me on the shoulder in a way that said, “Buck up, kid,” and joined the other DJs. I slumped. When Jon made his way out, that was our cue to leave. Cat escorted me to the place I needed to go to get to my seat, and I turned to hug him. We stayed in touch for about a year, and even though I never got that photo, I’ll always think fondly of him.

When I got to my seat, the opening band was playing—I can’t remember if it was Cinderella or Tesla—and my mom and Margie were there. My mom’s face lit up immediately and then toned down slightly when she saw my face.

“How was it?”

“It’s over. I met him and he didn’t fall in love me!” I howled.

“Oh, honey. Why don’t you just…you know…try and enjoy the show?”

I sat in my seat, disgusted with myself, and cried and cried and cried. I didn’t cry at school, but I cried at home. After a couple weeks, I had to move on.

*   *   *

In the early 2000s, some friends convinced me to go to a Bon Jovi concert for nostalgia’s sake. I demurred at first, but they told me to get over myself and come with them. Just before the band came on at the sold out area, I wondered, What am I doing here? I still like him. He seems like he’s a serious man. He does a lot for charity and is married with kids to his high school sweetheart. He’s hardly ever in the tabloids and has been able to maintain popularity and relevance over the span of nearly thirty years. In fact, I admire him. But really, What am I doing here?

And then the lights went down, a guitar started playing, and he walked out on stage flashing a perfect smile on that beautiful mug.

And I was sixteen again.

Trust in Me, Baby

Sometimes you've just gotta trust the hand you've got.

Promotional tie-in alert! I’ve got an essay up today on Medium.com’s new mind and body channel. It’s a revisiting of something I wrote years ago, before The Beheld had much of a readership, about my own complicity in what some people might call beauty privilege, but what really amounts to sexism (and not only because I am far too modest to own up to “beauty privilege,” kittens). Specifically: By playing the part of a young-enough, pretty-enough woman and putting up with a certain amount of comments about being that part, I expected a certain amount of privilege. (Not universally; it’s specific to a former landlord whom I let make semi-lewd comments to me in hopes that my apartment would receive prompt attention when need be. Oh, just read the story.)

It’s been interesting to revisit this; the events in the piece happened three years ago, and I wasn’t yet as in the habit of looking at secondary themes when looks-related situations arise. When I look back on this situation now that it’s long over (my current landlord, Tanya, has never eyeballed me once), what stands out to me is my distrust. My distrust in my then-landlord, for starters, which in this case was earned. But really, it’s my distrust in myself that I’m noticing here. Or maybe not myself exactly, but more a lack of trust in the way things should work. When I relayed this story to a friend, she sympathized, but then pointed out that what I thought was a “weak hand” in the power balance between us actually wasn’t. That is: I am a good tenant. I pay rent on time; I’m quiet and courteous; I came to that particular apartment with excellent references; I’m housebroken. My former landlord had been looking for the right tenant for two months—this is unheard of in New York City—before I moved in. For in his own words, “I want someone who will treat the place right,” and his instincts (and my references) told him that I was that person. My hand was strong. And yes, he gave me attitude about making repairs that he wasn’t legally obliged to make, but the point here is that he gave me attitude even though I played the part of flirty, easygoing lady tenant. My real, actual, legal hand here of being a good tenant and knowing that that was valuable to him was just fine. Hell, in the end, he even made the repair I asked for. In fact, there’s a chance I made my hand weaker by playing the part I thought he wanted me to play. Had I approached every encounter with him in a wholly straightforward manner—just business, just the facts, no giggles—he may well have taken my complaint more seriously.

I can’t help but wonder how often I make the same mistake or assumption—that I’d better make the most of my looks, because that’s what’s really going to get me out of a jam when the time comes—out of distrust of my actual hand in life. I mean, yeah, it’s hard not to, when there are messages everywhere telling us that women’s accomplishments aren’t worth a damn unless they look good (and then they probably just slept with someone to go places, right?). But I also know that there are plenty of messages counter to that. Loads. (Including one that’s purposefully counter: Beauty Redefined’s “You Are Capable of Much More Than Being Looked At” sticky notes—promotional tie-in #2!—now available for purchase.) I mean, half the time I’m aware of people denigrating the appearance of women in the public eye, I’m only aware of it because someone has called bullshit on it. And believe you me, I did not grow up believing my looks would get me anything in life. (I remember justifying to myself as early as age 9 that it was okay that I wasn’t pretty, because I was smart, and lordy knows being both was impossible.) So when did I begin to subconsciously rely on my “girlish charm”? I wonder if this phenomenon could only exist in complicity with women’s inordinate distrust in our own appeal that we hear so much about. The flipside of not trusting your own appeal is that you overemphasize its importance. I don’t mean to make myself out to be a total sad sack, but honestly, this is sort of a lose-lose situation.

But back to the idea of not trusting others: When I was 24, I took a trip to Italy with my then-boyfriend. Being in Italy with a male companion was an experience entirely different from being in Italy alone, which I’d done the year before. I hear the culture has radically shifted since then (I haven’t been back since I was 24), but at the time, if you were alone and female, you were bait. This was charming at times (a shopkeeper in Florence ran to the music store next door to find a copy of “Autumn in New York” to put on when I told him where I lived), frightening at others. I remember at one point literally having a trail of three men walking behind me for several blocks, until I ducked into a polizia station, where the officers told me I had no need to worry—“When they stop looking, that’s when you worry”—but schooled me on a few choice phrases anyway. I’d told my boyfriend all about my earlier adventures, and had rather condescendingly pointed out that it was unfortunate that he wouldn’t receive as warm a reception from the Italians.

Which he didn’t. That is: He wasn’t followed down the street, nobody in the grocery line put down money for his goods, no bottles of wine mysteriously appeared at our table. People, men, were polite, but not...gregarious/overbearing. And still: One morning in Palermo, we went to the market, dazed by a rocky night’s sleep on an overnight train, and he stood in front of an olive vendor selling more varieties of olives than either of us knew existed. I’d been doing most of the communicating for us—doing my best with hand gestures, guidebooks, and college French—but I was too tired to figure out how to ask for olives, and I didn’t care for olives anyway, so we just stood there, staring. The man took a piece of paper from behind his cart, whipped it into a cone of sorts, spooned a heap of olives into it, and handed it to my boyfriend, whose eyes lit up like a six-year-old’s at Dairy Queen. When he dug out his wallet to offer some lira to the olive vendor, the man waved him away—prego, prego—with a smile. Waved him away with a smile: him, not me; the young freckled American who clearly wanted olives and would take utter delight in them, not the pretty-enough woman by his side.

I think of that sometimes, when I catch myself consciously thinking that being nominally attractive might curry some sort of favor. I mean, we all know it can, and you don’t need to be a traffic-stopper to reap the sort of benefits I’m talking about here. But when I’ve slipped into that worldview too deeply, I’ve robbed myself of the expectancy of human goodness. It’s a cynical mind-set, one that winds up reinforcing the idea that women are meant to be decorative objects—something I don't believe of any woman, certainly not of myself. Perhaps I developed that cynicism as a defense mechanism against the smatterings of disappointments that can accompany womanhood if you approach it from a certain angle and squint. But fuck it: I know better now than to think my own offerings, and the offerings of others, are most abundant at the surface. 

Right?

Nicole Kristal, Writer and Bisexual Advocate, Los Angeles

Picking a title to introduce Nicole Kristal was probably the most challenging part of this interview. Screenwriter, sure—her short film, Do You Have a Cat?, has been screened at LGBT festivals internationally. (You can rent it for $2 at BuskFilms.com, and I suggest you do exactly that.) Author, yes—her (hilarious) book, The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, cowritten with Mike Szymanski, won a Lambda Literary Award. Songstress, check—her rock-folk CD manages to be warm yet biting, melancholy yet upbeat. Blogger, mais oui—you may have come across her piece "Watching a Friend Die on Facebook," which went viral last year, from her grief blog. And as it happens, her skills extend to my arena too: She edited the first piece I ever wrote about beauty, published in our college magazine. But it’s her expertise in one of her work’s recurring themes—bisexuality—that made me want to interview her here. We talked about what hair length has to do with sexuality, navigating the line between showing interest in women and objectifying them, and why bisexuals are terrible dressers. In her own words:

On Signals

You can't pass someone on the street, look at their clothes and say, "That person's bi.” You can do that sometimes with a gay man or a butch lesbian, though I like to avoid assuming someone's sexuality based on fashion and mannerisms—there are too many exceptions.In the 1920s didn’t men wear a red necktie or something like that to signal that they were gay? It would be great if bisexuals had something like that. But say bisexuals had a uniform and they could just walk around and people would know—that still might not help that much because I wouldn’t know what type of bisexual you were. You might be a disjunctive bisexual woman who sleeps with women but doesn’t fall in love with them. There’s just this extra element of sleuthing for bisexuals to figure out if what you have with someone is viable, and in what way.

But there seems to be a standard uniform for female bisexuals in the media: prominent boots—usually leather—tight skirts, also usually leather, and low-cut, revealing tops. Whether it's Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Haunting or Kalinda Sharma in The Good Wife, they’re effeminate, sexually aggressive and often narcissistic or mysterious—keeping their hearts at a distance and never falling in love. And this seductivity and emotional distance comes across in their clothes. But in real life, we don't wear this uniform.

Many of us struggle to reconcile the male and female energies inside us, and it comes out in a sort of mish-mash androgynous look that is not quite effeminate and not quite masculine, which is why I joke that bisexuals can be terrible dressers. This probably doesn’t apply to bisexual women with a preference for men—their style tends to be more characteristically straight—but the bisexuals like me who lean more toward the queer side can sometimes resist fashion trends, to their detriment. 

For my film, we had an incredibly hard time casting the lead character. None of the actresses seemed bisexual to me—not their style or their manner.We didn't want to fulfill the stereotype but we didn't want to ignore it entirely either. We finally just chose the best actress we could find as the lead and hoped we could style her into a believable bisexual. On her date with a man, we went more girly in a black top with a simple silver necklace; we chose a gold hoodie for when she meets a potential female love interest for the first time. We threw in a black and red checkered scarf for her second encounter with the woman—an item that can read straight or gay. I think some bisexuals do that in real-life—we dress more masculine when attending gay events or going on dates with women, and we femme it up when we go out with our straight friends and guys. Whatever we did worked because people left the film thinking the actress, Samantha Sloyan, was bisexual when in fact she's straight. Then again, most of that can probably be attributed to the fact that Sam’s an amazing actress rather than to her clothes.

On the Male Gaze

I feel like I have to wear just as much makeup going to a lesbian bar than I would going out on a date with a guy. In fact, I might get away with less makeup with the guy, because I’m usually so sure that a guy wants to have sex. I don’t have to work too hard. But with women you can say one wrong thing and they lose interest.

I really think women can look at your shoes and lose interest. I’m serious! I remember reading in Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him about a study that there are really only a handful of reasons a guy wouldn’t go on a second date with a woman, but there are hundreds of reasons why a woman wouldn’t go on a second date with a guy. That pickiness applies to women dating women too, so that factors into my appearance: I don’t want the way I look to be one of the reasons a woman wouldn’t want to go out with me. So yeah, when I go to a lesbian club I’ll wear my high-heel black leather boots or whatever. 

I don’t think I cater to the male gaze. I almost rebel against doing that, because I don’t think it’s necessary. When you’re bisexual, it can be easier to have a detachment from straight men without doing it as a game. I’ve seen straight women play that game with guys, acting disinterested so he’ll be more interested—bisexual women might be more genuine about that. It’s like, “Yeah, we had sex, that was fun,” and then we’ll go hang out with our lesbian friends, if you’re the kind of bisexual woman who is more on the queer side. It changes the whole paradigm. I can be like, “I’m wearing makeup today, I might not be wearing makeup tomorrow. Deal with it.” You’re not asking permission.

On Hair

The thing with the queer community here in L.A. is that you have to choose a look. You have to be like, I’m butch, or I’m soft butch but am masculine-identified or whatever. And then if you’re femme you really rock the femme look and wear heels or some other sort of really girly shit. I wasn’t really enough of either of those—I wasn’t great at being super-effeminate, and I wasn’t amazing at being a tomboy or butch, so I sort of fell through the cracks. Until I figured that out I wasn’t really having much success meeting women. I remember a bisexual friend telling me that she wasn’t getting women when her hair was long. So she cut off her hair, and it started happening. She said, “If you want to get pussy, cut your hair off.” Because then you don’t just get all the gay women who are comfortable dating someone who looks gay, you also get straight women wanting to experiment, because they want to choose someone who’s “really” gay to do that with. But then, women I know who have gone for the androgynous look have a fuck of a time dating guys, getting guys to not see them as lesbians.

I’m dating this woman who’s got short hair and looks kind of butch, so for the first time I’m sort of like, “Okay, we look gay, and I have to deal with this.” I took her to the same restaurant where I’d been on dates with men and everyone was looking at us—she eventually took her glasses off because she got tired of people looking at her to figure out if she was a girl or a boy. It’s funny, actually: I’d dated this same woman before, years ago, and she had long hair then. And I don’t know if I would have dated her then if she’d had short hair. I was less comfortable with being queer, so I didn’t want to go out in public and be like, “Hi, we’re the gay couple.” I wanted people to think we were best friends. Now I don’t really care. And in a way I like that her hair is short now—she looks so different than she did with long hair. It was the woman with long hair who broke my heart, so it’s almost like she’s someone else now.

On The City of Angels

I think each region has their own thing as far as a queer look. The scene is very effeminate here in L.A.; there are very few women with short hair. There’s such a pressure to be femme that sometimes you’ll even have these butch women who have long hair but are otherwise so masculine. Honestly, I think what happened is that The L Word came out and it influenced the scene. There was this impact of, This is how you should be as a queer woman. Being a lesbian was seen as this hot thing where two effeminate women are together and everyone wants to fuck them. It kind of left butch women in the lurch. I mean, it’s Hollywood, you can be gay, but there’s this pressure to appear fuckable to men even if you’re a lesbian. And if you’re bisexual, you’re supposed to be double fuckable. You’re supposed to be this hypersexualized persona. At the same time, people in San Francisco, where things aren’t as shallow, aren’t necessarily groomed to the level of L.A. people, so L.A. can kind of ruin you for that. Like, pluck those hairs in your ears or whatever! Get your eyebrows done. I found myself getting kind of turned off by stuff like that in a shallow way after I’d lived here for a while.

These two butch women from San Francisco went with me to a gay night at a club here, and there was this game where you’d throw these sandbags trying to knock over Barbies. If you knocked over a certain number of Barbies you’d win a shot. And these two women were like, “This shit would notfly in San Francisco—literally knocking over women? It’s so offensive.” And then they were like, “Let’s do it!” They were excited that they could do this silly game and not be persecuted for it like they would be in San Francisco. Down here in L.A. people aren’t as offended by stuff that actually is offensive, as far as the objectification of women, because there’s such a high premium on being fuckable. I mean,

I’m coming from the ’90s so I’m politically aware of objectification—and it can be hard for me, looking at other women sexually. I’m aware of how it feels to be objectified so I don’t want to do that, but I want to show that I’m still interested in women sexually. But when there’s this group behavior around objectification it’s like that becomes what’s expected.

On Women’s Bodies

My sister always gives me shit for this, but I always end up with big-breasted women. It’s not intentional! I just think there’s something when you have smaller boobs like I do, you like to date women with the opposite of what you have. I’m not really interested in women with the same body type as me—I’m disinterested in skinny women, so I always end up dating women that are kind of voluptuous. They hold you in their arms and they’re soft, and I just prefer that to some skinny chick like me. But my body tends to make that kind of woman insecure. They say stuff like, “Oh, I’m going to start going to the gym more.” I’m like, “Why? I don’t give a shit about that, just be healthy.” I like the way women put on weight. There are some shallow lesbians who would never date a fat woman, and they’re missing out, because there’s so much more to do. There’s so much more to explore.

I watched this friend of mine pick up woman after woman, and I was jealous because I couldn’t. I finally said, “How do you get so many women?” She was like, “I just figure out what they’re most insecure about, and I tell them I love that the most.” I feel like that’s dishonest—but this woman I’m dating now, she’s like, “I’m going to lose some weight,” and I’ve started doing that a little, telling her how much I love her body. And yeah, I think her body’s amazing, but when I tell her, “Your body is amazing, I think about it all the time,” that’s a bullshit line. Sometimes that’s what girls need to hear to feel comfortable, so I finally started saying these things to build a comfort level. I do love her body, I’m not lying, but do I sit around thinking about it every second? No. But it was funny because I said that to her—“I think about your body all the time”—and she goes, “Even when you’re pooping?” We cracked up. I mean, the main thing we have in common is our sense of humor. But that was her kind of calling bullshit on my line too.

Fairest of Them All: Excerpt and Giveaway

Some might say that novelist Carolyn Turgeon's books tell the hidden side of fairy tales. That's true enough, but I'd put it differently: Her books tell of the ways women relate to one another through beauty. The idea behind Carolyn's latest, The Fairest of Them All, is deceptively simple: What if Rapunzel were Snow White's "evil stepmother"? That is, what if we saw the evolution of how a sympathetic woman renowned for her beauty became so obsessed with another person's loveliness that she'd order her death?

It's a variation on a theme Carolyn explored in Mermaid, which spotlights the relationship between the mermaid and the princess of the classic fairy tale: "They're both beautiful, but they are literally different species, and I wanted to explore that complicated relationship." I asked her about the ways the heroines of The Fairest of Them All relate to beauty:

"In fairy tales, women like Rapunzel and Snow White tend to be valued for their beauty above anything else. I mean, they can be stuck in a tower or lying dead in a coffin in the forest and the most eligible bachelors will still fall in love with them instantly, that is how hot they are. I’m not sure that anyone’s falling in love with anyone because of their great hearts or their mutual love of The Smiths, if you know what I mean. In that context, how’s a dazzler like Rapunzel or Snow White—or any other woman who believes that her only value or power comes from her beauty—going to deal with getting older? The evil queen’s obsession with her mirror and hatred of Snow White seem like an understandable reaction to me, when it comes down to it. That kind of privileging of youth and beauty of course creates plenty of anxiety and rivalry among women—though in real life they might not eat each other’s hearts—which I personally try to address and find some way out of in my books.

"I think part of what makes Snow White so lovable and so marriageable is that she’s not only stunning but totally humble; there she is hanging out with birds and squirrels, oblivious to the fact that she’s so hot that men are falling all over themselves to get with her. Armed with youth, good genes, and a fairy gift or two, she can afford to be. The evil queen doesn’t really have that luxury, not anymore. There she is, off to the side, still beautiful but no longer getting any of that attention that’s now being lavished on Snow White. We like women who are beautiful but don’t know they are; we like those ladies in the Dove ads who are stunned and delighted to discover that they’re lovely. I think part of what makes the queen so evil is that she’s not being bashful or humble about the fact that she’s beautiful. She’s fully aware of her beauty and the power it once gave her but isn’t really giving her anymore. And she’s pissed! She knows full well what youth and beauty will bring Snow White: marriage, love, the potential for riding off into a happily ever after…until she gets that first gray hair, anyway."

Enjoy the excerpt below that expands on this idea—and leave a comment to be entered to win a signed paperback copy of The Fairest of Them All. The novel is written for adults but also has great young adult crossover appeal. Giveaway open through 11:59 p.m. ET August 19, 2013. And hey, New York readers: Join me tonight at 6 p.m. at the Tribeca Barnes & Noble to hear Carolyn read from the book!

More events nationwide listed here.

*     *     *

I was the girl with the long long hair, trapped in the tower. You have no doubt heard of me. As a young woman I was very famous for those tresses, even though I lived in the middle of the woods and had never even been to court, not for a feast or a wedding or a matter of law.

My hair was like threads of gold flowing down my back and past the floor. If I didn’t tie it up, it would sweep across the stone and collect dust like a broom. I could lean out my tower window and it would fall out like an avalanche, gleaming like the sun hitting the water. It was as bright as sunflowers or daisies, softer than fur, stronger than an iron chain.

Every night I took horsetail and aloe from the garden, spoke words over them, and boiled them and mashed them into a thin pulp, which I then combed through my locks to make them strong and healthy and almost impossible to break. I would sing, and inhale the rich scent, to make the work go faster. To this day I love that feeling, of fingers running through my hair, the weight of it as it falls on my back.

Poets and troubadours sang of my beauty then.

It was sorcery, that hair. Sometimes now I wonder if things would have been different, had I been plain.

It is a hard thing, not being that girl any longer. Even as I sit here, I cannot help but turn toward the mirror and ask the question I have asked a thousand times before:

“Who is the fairest of them all?”

The mirror shifts. The glass moves back and forth, like water. And then my image disappears, until a voice, like a memory, or something from my bones and skin, gives me the same answer it always does now:

She is.

I turn back to the parchment in front of me and try to ignore the ache inside. The apple waits on the table next to me, gleaming with poison. All that’s left to do is write it down, everything that happened, so that there will still be some record in this world.

Beauty Blogosphere Hiatus

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't done my links roundup for a couple of weeks. I'd intended to just take a brief break, but when I started putting together this week's collection, I realized exactly why I wanted a break: Reading all that can be exhausting! And right now I'm trying to focus my reading energies on larger pieces, i.e. books, to give myself a solid background to draw from in writing my own book. (Plus, I'm still figuring out how to write a book and blog at the same time without growing roots at my computer.)

So the Beauty Blogosphere is on hiatus for a bit longer. It will return—I love finding and curating these links, and it's a fun departure from the other kind of posts I have on here—but not for a couple of months. In the meantime, if you're seriously jonesing for some beauty news, here are a few options:

• Follow me on Twitter! I still find plenty of articles and tweet them out there.

• Subscribe to any of these beauty-related blogs, all of which have great roundups:
   —Wild Beauty (Beauty Bytes, most Fridays)
   —Makeup Museum (Curator's Corner, most Saturdays)
   —Already Pretty (Lovely Links, Fridays)
 
• And if you read Beauty Blogosphere more for its non-beauty aspects, either its style or its politics or other influences, you might enjoy these:
   —Shines Like Gold (Triple Decker Weekly, weekends, eclectic right-brain awesomeness)
   —Fritinancy (Linkfest, monthly, word- and naming-oriented)
   —Becky's Kaleidoscope (Link Love, often daily, eclectic)
   —Aaron Bady (Sunday Reading, Sundays, eclectic)  
   —Tits and Sass (The Week in Links, Fridays, sex work)
   —Jessica Stanley (Read. Look. Think., Fridays, eclectic)

Other suggestions welcome in comments!

Invited Post: "She Has Glasses"

Longtime readers may remember an invited post by Alexa, aka Blossoming Badass, that I ran some time ago as a teen perspective on the beauty mores of her generation. Alexa's writing first spoke to me because—at the risk of sounding like one of the adults in her poem "Lines Converging"—it reminded me of my own at her age. But in watching this particular badass blossom, I see that I was mistaken: Her voice has grown into one that mixes careful observance of self and others with searing moments of intensity—a mix that's quite a feat to pull off (and one I certainly couldn't as a college freshman, which she'll be this fall). I'm so glad to have Alexa back on The Beheld with this piece on navigating comfort, prettiness, and glasses...another feat I haven't yet been able to pull off! You can read more of Alexa's work on her Tumblr.

I was in eighth grade when I realized that only the weird kids still wore glasses.

It hadn’t always been this way. You couldn’t see the board? Or the words in books? You got some glasses! Most kids were reluctant, like me, to actually wear them. The reading-glasses kids were especially wary; I remember a boy named Robbie in my fourth-grade class kept them covertly in his desk except during silent reading time, when he huddled behind his book. I only saw him wearing them one day, when I had to stand behind Robbie’s desk to ask Mr. Fuller if I could use the restroom during silent reading. But still, it was better for girls to wear glasses than boys, anyway, because boys would fall and sometimes break theirs when they played soccer during recess.

I took a similar route, keeping my glasses in their bright-blue case in my cubby, only taking them out when I had to read the spelling list on the board for all of elementary school. In sixth grade, however, I decided I could start fresh and avoid this inconvenience by just wearing them every day. They were wire-framed and purple back then, the frames rounded rectangles, making my round face look even rounder. I would wear them for all of middle school, give or take a few weeks of seventh grade and all special occasions when my mom told me I had to wear contact lenses, which I found extremely uncomfortable.

But by eighth grade, the solid third of my grade who had worn glasses was diminished to a mere few. Girls who had special needs, boys from families we had deemed unusual, kids who still cried too much and wore the clothes their moms picked out for them. I wasn’t being mean, but I knew I wasn’t a Weird Kid. I was different, but I had friends. I was smart, but I wasn’t just a nerd; I understood what was going on with the other kids, what they liked and why they liked it, even if I was more of a spectator than a participant. It’s probably pertinent that seventh-into-eighth grade was the first time I felt fully alienated by my body, but I knew it was going to take more than hair straightening or makeup or contact lenses (the defenses of the other girls) to make me feel any better. That is, glasses removal wasn’t going to do anything drastic.

Eighth grade was when I really started to talk. About things I cared about. My clothing choices were mostly governed by two things, both of which were different from the other girls. My pants were never skin-tight and my skirts and shorts were never ever short, not because my parents were strict (trust me, my mom wished I would dress like the others), but because I thought my thighs were too fat and my hips were too wide already. And secondly, my shirts weren’t too tight either, but they were all covered in quotes and slogans and buttons expressing the things that I suddenly cared about. T-shirts, bought plain at Target and decorated with homemade iron-ons of my favorite quotes from famous women. I didn’t care if I looked pretty, if I wore glasses. I was suddenly really excited, and ready to change things. Lots of famous women in history wore glasses, like Eleanor Roosevelt at the United Nations, and Rachel Carson looking into a microscope. It didn’t matter if I did too.

Ninth grade, meanwhile, was when I became Cute. I looked young for my age. I still didn’t wear makeup, but my pants were slightly more normal-fitting. I had a squeaky little voice that spoke up and said honest true things that the bigger voices didn’t. I was lucky (or so I thought) that people listened, accepting my assertions as Cute instead of dismissing them as Annoying or Obnoxious, as they would have been if I was bigger and stronger about what I was saying. Quite relatedly, in the spring of ninth grade, I got my first pair of Cute glasses. They had plastic frames that looked like wood, and were more rectangular. I felt ok wearing them. Lots of people said they liked them, too. The glasses confirmed the Cute.  

By ninth grade, I was much more torn up about the fact that I wasn’t pretty. It was rather cemented in my mind. In the preceding year, all of my friends had Become Pretty in some way.

There were lots of things you could be, I learned, that were all positive reflections of your face and makeup and clothes and weight and body and personality: You could be pretty. You could be lovely. You could even be hot. None of these words really allowed the presence of glasses on one’s face. (You could be beautiful, too, but that was a special word that wasn’t a reflection of you so much as it was that the person who was saying it liked you. Usually it was a grown-up who could tell that you were sad.)

Yet all around me, friends who were skinny and flat-chested rapidly developed breasts and hips while their stomachs stayed perfectly concave and their legs smooth and strong. Awkward friends with weird hair and funny clothes started to develop a style, to figure out how braiding or straightening or whatever else worked out for them. Braces were removed and somehow that made all the difference. They were suddenly pretty or cute or hot.

I was a different Cute, more bunny-cute than girl-cute. Cute like a fluffy pink tutu, not like a stretchy denim mini-skirt from Forever 21. And if I got too loud, I could tell even that would be taken away from me.

As one of only two freshman along with my friend Meghan in the Drama Club, Cute was the lot I received. (Meghan, even cuter, and spritely-tiny on appearance, but far snarkier once spoken to. She wore glasses and contacts alternately, about half and half, but she was already stunningly delicately pretty, like a ballerina.) They seemed to like me. They said I was Smart and Cute sometimes, two of my favorites. I was small and very naive, and most of them were seniors, with cars and romantic relationships and independence. I was happy to have a home. But I knew I had to be careful. Once I had a label, an identifier, a role, I felt a need to maintain it.

“She has glasses,” you’d have to say describing me to your friend so he could spot me in a crowd. “She’s short with glasses and dark hair...yep, that’s her.” You’d just have to mention the glasses first as they became unusual, identifyingly characteristic. That was the thing that set me apart from my other friends, not being the least-thin, not being Cute, which would soon grow to make me feel too young, too. But glasses? Glasses I could deal with. Glasses were my choice.

They also became my one-more-fortress between myself and the rest of them. By tenth grade, I couldn’t look at my face in the mirror without them, and I didn’t want anyone else to, either. Without them I was exposed. Without them, I had to compete.

That’s what I was scared of, I realize now. If I didn’t have glasses, I would be in the competition with everyone else to be pretty. I hated playing soccer as a kid because it was uninteresting, and because I knew I wasn’t good at it. I felt the same way about Being Pretty. There was the same allure to it—being on the soccer team meant a group of friends (of varying levels of superficialness) and some degree of notice and admiration from others. Being Pretty was the same, but the allure was undeniably heightened. I hated trying to Be Pretty too, then, because I hated losing. Losing was inevitable.

But being Cute was pretty fun. At the end of that year I’d start to wear short skirts, but with sneakers instead instead of flats or sparkly flip-flops or especially tottering on espadrilles. I’d wear my prettiest dresses and my favorite shirts, and never stop wearing my glasses. I got to do Cute my way, instead of theirs; I was out of the competition. I’d start to wear shirts saying things I believed in that weren’t four sizes too big; my way, not theirs. My glasses never ever had a logo on the side like the girls who just wore their glasses when they were tired; mine. I’d start to wear eye makeup under my glasses a year later, completely unprecedented; still mine.

I don’t remember specifically where things changed. Seeds were probably planted by tenth grade when I began to apply the thick and smudged black eyeliner. But in the past year or so, I decided I could be pretty with glasses. It just happened. I wore them to graduation and felt pretty. I wore them all days, to concerts and friend’s parties and calculus class on gloomy rainy mornings, and some of those days were good. The glasses became a part of me, and they became a part that I liked. My dynamic views on my body itself (something I very, very recently realized was mine, and still forget often) were counteracted by my glasses, plastic and glass and not-living and unchanging. Mine. Which I get to put on my face.

I don’t think I’m pretty without glasses, however. By my own opinion, or the competition of the world that I still feel whirling around me. They have become armor, armor that I do not feel comfortable dropping.

*     *     *

I got new glasses last week. I asked my little brother, age fourteen, to help me pick. He’s really good with aesthetics, but he couldn’t decide. So I asked the middle-aged woman, sitting in the waiting room with her eyes dilated and laughing at everything my brother and I said.

“Which do you like best?” I asked.

She looked behind her, surprised. “Are you speaking to me?”

“Yes! You’re totally aware that we can’t decide.”

“I can’t really see... Come closer.” The woman examines me in all three different trial pairs, blinking through the blurry discomfort of her eyes’s dilation.

“Those.” She said definitively when I put on the third pair for a second time. “Definitely those.”

So Those are the ones I’m wearing on my face right now. First I thought they made me look elderly. Then I thought they made me look too young. Now I’m pretty sure they make me look too overtly lesbian, or perhaps too hipster. Yesterday I wore my hair differently and one of my mom’s shirts and I thought I was pretty. And I’ll probably decide something else tomorrow, whether I notice the change occurring or not.

We only have control over such few things, and I might as well use this opportunity to my advantage instead of against it. Use it as an opportunity to like how I feel about myself. Why not?

Regardless, I get to decide.

Coming to My Senses: Excerpt and Giveaway

A memoir about perfume from anyone other than a perfumer seems unlikely—unlikelier still that such a book would raise questions about gender, community, family history, class, and expectation. So it’s fitting that unlikely is one of the keywords here to Alyssa Harad’s memoir, Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride. There’s much to love about this book—the lyrical words, the sensual descriptions of various perfumes, the ongoing navigation of bridedom—but what I appreciated about it above all was the way it reconciled feminism with what one might label “the feminine arts.” (Though as Alyssa’s story of having a sniff-fest with a transgendered friend of hers shows, fragrance is hardly limited to the feminine.) I felt a pulse of recognition throughout: The tale of learning to ease the imagined divide between the pleasures of perfume (or makeup, or a perfectly crafted shoe) and the idea that as a feminist, one “should” be concerned with serious matters like Injustice and Legislation is one that I’m guessing plenty of readers here will identify with.

When I asked Alyssa about how writing this book engaged her sense of politics, she responded, “Perfume both complicated my politics and reinforced them. For example, it gave me a reason to separate out perfume and makeup and how women use them from the way the beauty industry exploits women's anxieties in order to sell them more products. It was feminism that had taught me to be suspicious of the industry's motives—especially the kind of feminism I had encountered and absorbed in my early twenties—but it was my training as an academic feminist that taught me to look very carefully at anything that is regularly dismissed as frivolous and feminine, because those things are often a source of power for women. And perfume is quite definitely a source of both power and deep pleasure for many women I know including myself. I wrote Coming to My Senses in part because I wanted more women to have that experience—not just with perfume, but with anything in their lives that they're drawn to but might dismiss as frivolous or, if they are certain type of earnest student, ‘problematic.’”

Enjoy the excerpt below that expands on this idea—and leave a comment to be entered to win a signed paperback copy of Coming to My Senses, plus two samples of perfumes that appear in the book. [Edited to add: Giveaway open through 11:59 p.m. ET August 12, 2013.] West Coast readers can catch Alyssa at one of her upcoming events: August 1 in San Francisco, August 3 in Los Angeles, August 7 in Portland, and August 12 in Seattle. (More details here.) Coming to My Senses can be found at independent booksellers (and the behemoths too).

*     *     *

If the center of the Kingdom of Women is a gleaming white-walled city built by movie executives and ad agencies, where supermodels, screen goddesses, and all the perfect girls we knew in high school fill the streets, I live far outside the city limits, beyond the suburbs, a few counties over, in a country village founded by a lesbian feminist collective in the mid-1970s. (Before that, it was a summer retreat for bohemians, and there’s still a strong artsy contingent.) I like it there, away from the glitz and the glare. In our softer, plainer light, it’s easier to see how many ways there are to live as a woman, how many forms and shapes there are of beauty, energy, work, and wisdom. There’s a lot of fresh air, and I’m surrounded by people quietly and not so quietly staking out new territory on the map, so that there are days, sometimes weeks, at a time when the category woman, as an immutable opposite of the category man, doesn’t mean much, and it’s easier to use the word person, which is a word I’ve always liked. It’s a place where small details are important—a new pendant, a line of silver buttons, a charmingly crooked tooth, a pair of particularly fine clear eyes.

I didn’t always live so far from the center of the kingdom. I started out more or less where my mother lives now, in the neat, well-kept suburbs just outside the city walls. In the Kingdom of Women (and sometimes in real life, too), the suburbs are all about being what my mother once called, with great approbation, well groomed. You’ve made the most of what you have, as though you were a country whose raw materials have been properly exploited. You’ve done a great job of putting yourself together, as though you were a chair or a car. It’s a learned skill, this self-creation, the territory of endless tips and tricks. Anyone who works hard enough, the theory goes, can be pretty (the corollary being that those who are not pretty do not work hard enough). To be well groomed requires an instinct for limits, boundaries, dividing lines. Money helps. (There’s a lot of shopping.) And free time. But for that mythical creature, the truly well-groomed woman, everything is effortless. The endless small adjustments and daily rituals of maintenance are as natural to her, and as expected, as breathing, walking, or using the telephone—say, to make a hair appointment. She notices her own polish as little as a former ballerina notices her perfect posture. Both are the result of years of practice.

I’m being a little mean. There’s a hissing, a little meow in my voice, that tells you how much that world frightens me, and how much I admire it. How I have to go on escaping it because it is a part of me. Its rules are a test I will go on failing all my life.

Because I was never a rebel, or at least I never meant to be one. (I may have refused to wear Lauren, but I longed for it all the same.) I wish there were a single story I could tell to explain what happened, but there isn’t. It was just a long series of negotiations, a no-I-won’t here and a yes-I-will there. An absurd number of these arguments had something to do with hair—all that cutting, combing, straightening, curling, waxing, shaving, plucking, bleaching, and spraying that was required of me, as though the moment I let my guard down I would become a snarling, thick-pelted animal.

And it’s true, I always had a wild streak, a taste for drama. All through my growing-up years, even when I matched my socks to my turtlenecks and blew my thick, curly hair straight and then set it in hot rollers for good measure, I was always a bit too much. It was as though I were wearing a costume I couldn’t take off. A loud, curvy, dark-eyed girl in a land of cool, slim-hipped blondes, I spent a lot of time onstage, where I made more sense. There, and elsewhere—the lines between life and stage aren’t always clear—I played the roles that were available to me: the tough showgirl, the exotic gypsy, the lusty wench, the Egyptian queen, the madwoman. Even at fifteen, the ingenue was beyond me. By the time I was seventeen I was singing “Big Spender” at the local charity auction, and though I have no memory of doing so, my mother loves to tell the story of how I came down off the stage, microphone in hand, to sit on the seventy-eight-year-old lap of J.R. Simplot, the billionaire potato king. In college, I played prostitutes, unfaithful wives, and, once, a blues singer named Honeypot. It was pure instinct, all of it.

So I went, skating along on this thin ice until the moment in my early twenties when feminism came along and plunged me into the cold, dark waters below. Dripping wet, but wide awake, I looked upon my double life with horror—prim constraint on one hand, a series of self-betraying stereotypes on the other—and in my usual earnest, censorious way, chucked the lot. It never occurred to me that I might be throwing away some things I wanted to keep.

And that’s where I was, more or less, fifteen years later when, having long forgotten most of what I’ve just told you, I sprayed on a bit of Paloma and went home to lie on the bed and ignore my mother’s e-mails about whether the napkins at the wedding reception should be brown or gold.

_______________________________________

From Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride by Alyssa Harad. Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright © Alyssa Harad, 2012.

Beauty Blogosphere 7.12.13

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Crop top: Cristen and Caroline nail it again with their podcast on what short hair symbolizes on women. (Bonus: You'll learn the real story behind Mia Farrow's pixie cut.)


...To Toe...
Toeing the line: Note to those hoping to deploy fraud to avoid paying full price for a pedicure, as was the case with a Connecticut woman this week who stopped the pedicure midway through and insisted on paying only $10: Dash out on the early side. "Police observed the final coat of polish on Parker’s nails and asked her to pay the full $22, which she refused, according to police." She was charged with sixth-degree larceny for theft of services.


...And Everything In Between:

Lady in red: Protests in Turkey and an icon of femininity colliding with tear gas combine to make a "hers" restroom sign in a university town in central Anatolia.

Working women: Along with the increase of women in India entering the paid urban workforce comes a demand for professional wares. Enter Unilever, with its new collection through the Lakme line, called 9 to 5.

Little yellow bottle: Clinique's Dramatically Different Moisturizing Lotion = The New Coke of beauty products?

Humpty hump: A Dubai company is entering the beauty sector with a product that truly hasn't been seen before in most of the world: camel milk beauty products. And naturally, the company name is Camelicious.

Dress for success: I thought it was a relatively new strain of feminism that saw women championing conventional markers of femininity (dresses, makeup, etc.) as a way of proclaiming feminist identity while holding on to those icons. Turns out it's not new at all: The leading British suffrage organization "used women’s fashionable dress to offer an overtly political argument: women could be both fashionable English women and militant Suffragettes."

AAthletes: "For the modern athlete, the question isn't whether breasts get in the way—it's a question of how to compete around them." (via Caitlin)

Oil me up: Can you use oils as sunscreen? The answer seems to be not really, though Venusian Glow reports positively on using raspberry seed oil, with an SPF of 28 to 50, placing it within the recommended SPF zone. (Other testers, not so much.) What's more probable is that research in this direction will come into play in creating a natural sunscreen, as indicated by research in India. Good thing too, since the glitter sunscreen market has been cornered already. Also relevant: What's the difference between sunscreen and sunblock?

On modesty: I'm intrigued by the idea of this woman's "modesty experiment," in which a feminist with (apparently) no religious beliefs that dictate modesty covered her hair, shunned makeup, and dressed modestly for nearly a year. The concept of modesty is complicated and I'm hoping that the writer, Lauren Shields (who blogs here), untangles much of that complication in her forthcoming book. But as Katie J.M. Baker points out at Jezebel, as it stands now, the experiment feels like it's missing something. The conclusions in the Salon piece are a tad pat, and the blog's emphasis on how glad she is to have ended the experiment seems uneven. Fingers crossed for a more meditative analysis to come; I trust it's there.

"Formulated with...": From a cosmetic chemist blog, a snapshot of "weasel words" the industry uses to imply claims that can't be stated directly. (Also, pssst: If you're into cosmetics science, pre-order The Beauty Brains' newest book, provocatively titled It's OK to Have Lead in Your Lipstick.)

Race daze: One of the things you hear over and over again from athletic women is how focusing on what their bodies can do rather than what their bodies look like is like a (temporary) wormhole out of self-objectification. Fit and Feminist's examination of race photos—the photos of sweaty, determined women who are focusing on exertion and crossing a finish line instead of controlling a goofy facial expression—considers what happens when those two ways of being collide.

Sniffer: The biggest factor men consider when choosing a cologne is, apparently, whether their partner likes it (which makes sense if worn according to a lovely guideline I once read—that the correct amount to wear was just enough so that a person embracing you would catch a whiff, and no one else). Any guesses as to what the biggest factor women consider is?

Make Up—Make Down, Sanja Iveković, 1976

Make Up—Make Down: The private ritual of cosmetics is part of its draw for many women—but that's just it, it's private. In her 1976 video piece Make Up—Make Down, Croatian artist Sanja Iveković lets us become privy to the intimacy of someone else's ritual: the heavy breath, the focus on the decolletage, the ritualistic opening of makeup jars. It's particularly interesting given that Iveković created the piece when Croatia was part of the former Yugoslavia—a time and place that cast makeup under a light of suspicion. (Thanks to Sarah Nicole for the link.)

Sitting pretty: Samvid has a nice mini-roundup of art that asks larger questions about beauty—including the recent "Barbie" designed to mimic the average 19-year-old woman's measurements.

Reproductive rights: "My body my choice" can be extended to pregnant women in dealing with comments from strangers—specifically male strangers, for this guest writer at Feminist Figure Girl.

Just my size: It's interesting to me how many of my female friends (and myself) have no problems saying that they have a definite body type they prefer in male partners—tall, chubby, muscular, skinny, whatever. Honestly, it's the kind of talk that would get me up in arms were a man to say it, which I'll admit is sexist of me; the more I read stories from men with body image concerns, the more it'll sink in that it's the same damn thing, but for now the knee-jerk reaction isn't the same. Perhaps it would be if there were "No Fat Dudes" baby tees? Whatever the case, this piece about being a lady "chubby chaser" is interesting, and makes me wonder about how much stock women place in being comparatively smaller than their partners.

This has potential to be cool: Online video makeup and hair consultations.

This has potential to be terrorizing: cosmetics chain partnering with facial recognition tech firm to detect customers' moods and allow them to send out personalized offers. (Now anti-drone apparel can go masstige!)

Bodily integrity: I can't think of a lovelier idea for helping sex workers connect with each other—and with their own bodies—than the community-organized day of spa and wellness treatments called "Whores' Bath."

Stripped: Theoretically I like the concept of nudity-as-liberation, but outside of the occasional nudist colony treatise (ugh) most of what you see on the matter focuses on the "is striptease/burlesque feminist?" question (to which I'd say, whatever). But! Gala Darling's report of a confidence class in which every participant shimmied naked down a runway is revelatory.

"I don't see my body as a canvas": I'm still pondering all the fantastic responses I got when I asked readers about why they wore makeup—and one particularly insightful response comes from Tatiana at her own blog.

Color me Edith: The Downton Abbey makeup line now exists, and now we can all try to have Lady Mary's skin and totally fail.

Ugly I: Several searing insights in this piece on the possibility of reclaiming "ugly"—made all the sharper when she points out to the reader that people's instincts are to discount the mere possibility that the writer might be ugly...which is exactly what I did when I saw her picture. Why does ugly seem so untouchable, as though it's the worst possible thing someone could be? (Still, I'm not as sure as the writer is here about the relationship between beauty and, say, humor: She wonders if she'd still be a stand-up comic were she conventionally beautiful, whereas I've heard plenty of other women in comedy wonder if the best way to get booked is to be hot.") (Thanks to Joy for the link!)

Ugly II: There are some wince-worthy parts of this essay on "ugly privilege" (since when is it only beautiful women who are sexually assaulted?), but it's an interesting illustration of the dynamics that come into play in female friendships where beauty is concerned. It's deeply uncomfortable stuff to talk about, particularly for feminists (okay, particularly for this feminist), so props for touching on a difficult topic, even if misguided. (Thanks to Rachel for the link!)

On "inner beauty": "The problem with the 'beauty is an attitude' logic is that it places all the blame and responsibility on women." Sing it, sister. The smartest critique of this line of thinking that I've ever read.

Anon was a woman: Why aren't models usually credited by name in fashion magazines? On illustrative shots it's one thing, but a fashion shoot is demanding of all laborers involved, and while it's routine to credit hairstylists, manicurists, etc., you rarely see the models acknowledged. Emily at The Closet Feminist raises the question and makes some excellent points. (Side note: In all my years copy editing magazines, mostly fashion-oriented, my only client that regularly credited models by name was a men's magazine.)

Go, Tootsie, Go

I've been half-in and half-out of the blogosphere for a couple of weeks, so when my blogger buddy Tatiana tweeted this video of Dustin Hoffman talking about Tootsie to me, I didn't realize exactly how viral it had gone. It was only today when I looked at Facebook for the first time in days that I realized it had been shared at least a dozen times by my friends—and not just my usual circle of feministy-bloggy suspects but by high school friends, coworkers from random jobs years ago, etc.

On the off-chance that you've missed the video, here's the gist: Hoffman talks about the impetus for creating Tootsie, and how when he first saw himself on test footage made over like a woman, he was pleased, but then asked his makeup artists to make him not just a woman, but a beautiful woman:

I thought, I should be beautiful—if I was going to be a woman, I would want to be as beautiful as possible. And they said to me, That's as good as it gets. ... I went home and started crying, talking to my wife, and I said... "I think I'm an interesting woman when I look at myself onscreen, and I know that if I met myself at a party, I would never talk to her, that character, because she doesn't fulfill physically demands that we're brought up to think that women have to have in order for us to ask them out." She says, "What are you saying?" [Hoffman tears up.] And I said, "There's too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed." And— [Hoffman catches his breath] That was never a comedy for me.

It's moving, it's unexpected, it reveals a glimpse of genuine emotion from a beloved entertainer. It's not hard to see why it caught on; my own knee-jerk reaction was to tweet it out. But when I started to look through my blog feed for the past few days and saw that I was on the tail end of many, many shares, I had to wonder exactly why it caught on so much.

Part of why we like this is that Hoffman articulates something about seeing himself as a woman that would take actual women a boatload of chutzpah to say: "I was shocked that I wasn't more attractive. ... Because I thought, I should be beautiful." Hoffman sees beauty as a part of the birthright of womanhood. And why wouldn't he? Why wouldn't we? We see him have the experience that for many women runs the course of a lifetime: recognition that beauty is not a meritocracy. It comes as something of a shock to those of us raised in America, the country that so loves its bootstraps myths and the notion that if you work hard enough at anything, you can achieve it. That neatly ignores entrenched systems like racism and classism—but hey, if we're talking beauty here, the realm of women, shouldn't that logically mean that the system is already gamed in our favor? But we know it's not: We can work as hard as we can at being beautiful and it can still elude us. Most of us can become attractive enough—including Hoffman, whose allure as Dorothy prompts a marriage proposal from Charles Durning's character. But that feeling that we should be beautiful—not out of some sense of womanly duty, or media pressure or any of that crap, but out of the fact of being a woman—well, that's hard to shed.

As the headline on Upworthy indicates, the video's popularity could well be because it's a man "Explaining Something That Every Woman Sadly Already Experienced." Yet when I look at exactly who is sharing it, it's nearly all women, and isn't the point here that women already understand the ways that our looks subtly open or close opportunities? The novelty factor comes into play, sure—it's one thing to muse about this amongst women, but for a man to have the opportunity to genuinely empathize with the emotions surrounding beauty is rare. (Men obviously deal with this too, but it's rare for any man to feel looks bias as a woman, much less toward oneself.)

Still, we don't need Hoffman to tell us this; we know it already, or at least that's the idea. But do we actually know? Part of the trouble with examining looksism is that we never quite know when we're being overlooked (or favored) because of our appearance, except in cases where it's explicit. In fact, it's sometimes easier to default to believing that a personal interaction hasn't gone smoothly because someone doesn't find us appealing; our bodies are convenient scapegoats for other stresses. What's intriguing about this video is that Hoffman, for the first time, has the experience of the split self: He is observing himself as both subject and object, as an actualized creature and as something to be gazed upon. When you're mired in your own split gaze from day one, the division between surveyor and surveyed isn't quite so sharp. What we learn here is not exactly an iteration of something we already know; all we really learn is that onceuponatime, Dustin Hoffman didn't like to talk to plain chicks, and that he learns about his own brainwashing. In truth, he doesn't learn a thing about women.

I'm not saying this as a dismissal of either Hoffman or of Adam Mordecai, the Upworthy writer who was key in making this go viral, but it's interesting that Mordecai coaches the video in terms of what women experience. I'm thrilled that both of these men are putting these sentiments out there, particularly since, by looking at Mordecai's Upworthy posts, this isn't a one-off nod to "women's issues" for him. But watching it as a woman who, like most women, has experienced a mix of dismissals and favors—overt and covert, recognized and silent—because of her looks, this video is more valuable as one perspective on the male gaze from men than as a comment on my lived experience.

And in fact, that's probably why it went viral—not because it's from a man, but because it's a clear, succinct, moving example of the ways that we're, to use Hoffman's word, "brainwashed." In many ways it's no different than anything that goes viral, even as I'd like it to herald some sort of progress in this arena. In fact, the video has what marketing expert Jonah Berger has identified as the six factors that make us want to share something: emotional resonance (he cries! we cry!), observability (it's a video, with someone familiar to us, and he cries!), usefulness (reinforces an aspect of our practical lived experience), storytelling (Hoffman, a master performer, is literally telling a story), triggers (our looks come into play every day), and social currency (believe me, everybody has something to say about looks and bias, so yes, it's popular).

I'm curious: Did you watch the video before reading this post? What was your reaction? Why do you think it caught on?

Vote for Me, S'il Vous Plaît?

I'm pretty much thrilled to have been nominated for the Marie Claire Most Wanted Beauty Blogger award. It's particularly thrilling that it's Marie Claire that took notice, since they have a long record of publishing excellent women's journalism of the sort that makes me proud to have worked in women's magazines.

The Beheld is up against some seriously big names in beauty blogging, like BellaSugar, YouBeauty, Into the Gloss, and The Beauty Brains—and is the only blog run independently (that is, it's just me here, folks, no creative director or whatnot). I'd be honored if you'd take a minute to vote for The Beheld (or whomever, I'll never know!). And if you'd like you can also enter to win a gift bag chock-full of goodies, so hey, incentive!

Beauty Blogosphere 6.28.13

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...

"Why go gray in my mid-50s? Because I can": There may be a "cure" for gray hair on the way, but Leah Rozen serves a reminder that there are plenty of reasons to let nature take its course.

I hope nobody from the TSA reads this blog.

...To Toe...

Pedi danger: The bad news is that not only do pedicure chairs start fires, but pedicure razors can be used as weapons too. The good news is that if a pedicurist gone wild attacks you with one, you won't even realize you've been stabbed, because the wounds are as tiny as your delicate little toenails, you gorgeous thing you.


...And Everything In Between:
Beauty labor: Beauty workers are more in demand than ever: 90% of beauty industry freelancers expect to increase or maintain their rates this year, and 70% of industry executives report that hiring rates are equal to or better than the halcyon days of pre-Lehman Brothers. But stable numbers don't necessarily translate to workers feeling confident about the future of their careers.

Barely there: The woman whose face is on the boxes of all those Sally Hansen depilation products, Marina Asenova, is suing her former agency for nonpayment of funds, as she has yet to see any royalties from her face lining an aisle of every drugstore in America—a practice that may well be par for the course, given the exploitation in the modeling industry. (Thanks to Lindsay for the link!)

White House welcome: Estee Lauder's VP and corporate communications director, Maria Cristina González Noguera, is headed Washington-way to be Michelle Obama's communications director. Who wants a lipstick shade named FLOTUS? 

Price is right: Where wealth goes, beauty ain't far behind: One in 10 residents of the United Arab Emirates spends the equivalent of a one-bedroom apartment in Dubai on beauty products. 

Bad ad: Dove got a slap on the wrist from the National Advertising Division for implying false claims about body washes from rival brands. Misleading side-by-side product demos were cited—as was an image of a bottle of competing body wash encircled in barbed wire, which is apparently a no-no? I don't quite get why the barbed wire image is a problem, to be honest. (Maybe it's retroactively punishing Unilever for that it'll-turn-brown-people-white ad from a few years back.)

The personal is political: With massive nationwide protests going on in her country, a Brazil-based blogger questions the importance of running a bra blog—and comes away with the conclusion that bra fitting is a political issue.

"Halal celebrities": The uptick in hijab fashionistas (hijabistas? wait, I Googled it, and yes, it exists) has begun to shift the non-Muslim vision in the U.S. of Muslim women as being oppressed and hidden underneath shapeless, drab clothes—and more to the point, it's provided a visible outlet for women who wear hijab to explore fashion and beauty. But when does the advice of hijab tutorials turn into tsk-tsking for not meeting this standard of beauty? "[O]f course many Muslim women don’t feel they can emulate J. Lo or Beyoncé. But we can emulate YaztheSpaz and Amenakin. They are the new line of halal celebrities." (Thanks to Tasbeeh for the link!)

Pretty toxic: Just a little reminder that your makeup may contain asbestos. Note that this doesn't apply to European readers—asbestos is among the 1,372 cosmetics ingredients banned by the E.U., but isn't among the ten (ten!) outlawed in the States.

Sleeping beauty: You all know humans grow new skin, but scientists haven't agreed on exactly why. Procter & Gamble to the rescue! ("Sleeping" stem cells, apparently.)

Body talk: Were common sense not enough to convince you, now there's a study showing that body talk to teens is more likely to trigger eating disorders if it takes the form of weight or body size, as opposed to healthy choices.

Edible self-tanner: If you're waffling on the suntan/self-tanner/pale-and-brave-it question this time of year, here's another option to get a nice tan-like glow: Eat more vegetables.

Kitchen beauty: For all the watchdogging I do on here about various beauty companies, I'm not quite sure why I haven't just started making my own beauty products. Whenever that time comes, this comprehensive list of 30 recipes should come in handy! And this set of general guidelines will be helpful too.

Tom Ford Cosmetics focus group.

Dudely dude: Designer Tom Ford is entering the skin care market—but not in a girly way or anything. Says the Estee Lauder group president, "This is a serious, high-ticket men's grooming line with a couple of products with cosmetics benefits to be used in a very masculine way," like in caber tossing and jerking off.

Fashion tips from Mr. T: "Do Calvin Klein, Bill Blass, or Gloria Vanderbilt wear clothes with your name on it? No, of course not. So you tape up the label, and wear your own name."

Beautypalooza: I'm not endorsing these particular products, but I thought this beauty checklist for festivals was solid. (But as it happens, I do use Stila Convertible Color on my cheeks, and sure enough, it works hangover magic—and stays put even through sweaty summer days.)

Breast jokes ever: Awesome collection of mammary humor from Hourglassy—I love it when women can joke about their bodies without making their bodies the punch line or denigrating themselves, and these anecdotes fit the bill. (And for further proof that these stories aren't teeming with self-loathing, note that this list of favorite things about being busty came from the same crop of readers.)

Hey there, handsome: Cristen Conger of How Stuff Works asks where all the handsome women went (and I'm honored that my Thoughts on a Word post on handsome was referenced). The handsome woman is still there—even if you wouldn't know it by the chicks-with-moustaches that pop up on Google Images for the term.

The true cost per wear: "Cost per wear" seems like a sensible way to shop, and if you do it right, it really is. But surely more than a handful of women (ahem) have also used it to justify expensive purchases with fingers crossed, oui? This post looking at the flaws and pitfalls in cost-per-wear theory can help you figure out when it's worth it (versus when you really just wanna buy something expensive).

Body Détente: Once upon a time, bloggers who mentioned body image generally only did so in terms of Why You Should Love Your Body. And then other bloggers who wrote on body image came along and were like, Yo, All the Body Love Talk Is Sort of Oppressing (hi!). And then Sally, ever the wise one, nicely reconciles the mind-sets and stakes a post on body neutrality: "When I see essays, suggestions, and advice from the body love community the main message I hear is that hating your body is counterproductive, not that loving your body is required."

Miyoko Hikiji, Soldier, Author, and Model, Iowa

“I feel obligated to educate anyone that doesn’t wear a uniform about what military service is like,” says Miyoko Hikiji, a nine-year veteran of the U.S. Army whose career began when she joined the Iowa Army National Guard in college, eventually leading her to serve with the 2133rd Transportation Company during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Her recently published book, All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (History Publishing Company, 2013), goes a good ways toward that obligation. And when I found out that the soldier-turned-author also began modeling upon retiring from the military, well, how could I not want to interview her? Beauty is hardly the most crucial aspect of a soldier’s life, but it’s an area unique to female soldiers, who make up 15.7% of active Army members—and who, in January, had all military occupational specialties opened to them, including combat units previously closed to women. Hikiji and I talked war paint, maintaining a sense of identity in extraordinary circumstances, and Hello Kitty pajamas. In her own words:

On-Duty Beauty

Military rules about appearance are pretty strict. Your hair has to be tied back in a way that doesn’t interfere with your headgear and that is above the collar of your jacket. That pretty much leaves it in a tight little bun at the nape of your neck. Once you get your two-minute shower and get out soaking wet, you just braid it together and it stays that way all day. After a mission or training, most of the women with longer hair wore their hair down, because having it in a bun under a helmet is really uncomfortable. In Iraq I might have had eyeshadow, from training and preparation before we actually got to Iraq. When we’d be in civilian clothes I’d have a little makeup for chilling out. But once I was actually in Iraq, I was more focused on sunscreen, moisturizer, vitamins. I just wanted to be healthy. And I had a stick of concealer. I wore that for some of my scars—there were a lot of sand fleas, and I had bites all over my body.

I couldn’t really approach trying to cover them well and look nice when I was there; I just needed to be clean. When I came home I did microdermabrasion for months to get rid of the scars. And I couldn’t wait to get regular haircuts. I also got my teeth whitened—we took daily medicine to protect against infection and malaria and stuff like that, but it makes your teeth turn yellow. 

In Kuwait I think we got a shower once every three days. We took a lot of baby wipe baths. Those lists that say, Send this to the troops—baby wipes are always on there. I did try to get my hair washed as often as I could. A lot of women would put baby powder on their hair and brush it out, to absorb the oil and the dirt. I’d just dump canned water over my head if that was the best I could do. If I was up by the Euphrates I would shave in the river if I had a chance, but that was something you didn’t get to do very often.

On War Paint

The idea of makeup as war paint is interesting. Actual “war paint”—camouflage paint—is like a little eyeshadow pack, so in camouflage class or in the field, you’d have a woodland one that has brown, two shades of green, and a black. You’d put the darkest colors on the highlighted parts of your face so they’re subdued, and then you kind of stripe the rest across your face. It’s extremely thick, almost like clay; you wear it and you sweat in it and it’s just there. It’s kind of miserable! But if you look at yourself in the mirror after doing these exercises with the camouflage paint on, it’s hard to look at yourself the same way. There really is something to putting on the uniform or the camouflage, or just the effect you have when you’re holding a loaded weapon. All that contributes to your behavior. So I definitely feel different when I wake up and put my regular makeup on.

I approach the world differently, and the world treats me differently. What is it that we’re fighting? That’s hard to say. On some levels, I feel like when I wear makeup I’m buying into the whole thing of what a man tells me looks pretty, or that I’m kind of giving up part of my natural self. But then I justify it by saying, Well, it works, or Well, I’m getting paid to do that right now, with modeling. There is a lot of conflict there. It’s sort of a war on self, sort of a war on womanhood.

On Modeling

There was a tactical gear company filming some commercials at Camp Dodge, where I trained. They were going to have the actors go through an obstacle course I’d been through, doing everything at the grounds that I’d been training at for years. At the audition they said, “We’d like for you to have weapons experience, because we’re gonna shoot some blanks out of M-16s.” I thought, There’s no way I’m not gonna get this part. And then I didn’t. They picked people who were bigger, probably a little gruffer. People who looked the stereotype of what you think a soldier looks like.

To be fair, I don’t know all their criteria, so it’s easy for me to say they thought I was too pretty, too feminine. I don’t know that. But I do know that people who were picked for that modeling job didn’t have more experience than I did. Certainly none of them had weapons experience like I did. I think that they just didn’t believe that I fit the bill of looking like a soldier. 

My experience in the military couldn’t have been anything but a benefit to anything I did in the future. Whenever I have a modeling job I always show up on time or early. I always have everything I’m supposed to have—not only do I print it out, but I check it just like a battle checklist. I look at every project like a mission. When I get there, I always have enough of whatever is needed to take care of somebody else who’s not prepared, which would be a squad leader’s position. I’m used to all that, and the people I work for are usually kind of surprised. In the middle of a job, if something happens, I’m okay with cleaning it up, whereas maybe other models or actresses might feel like that isn’t what they’re being paid to do, or that it’s a little below them. But you do so many crappy jobs in the military. You burn human poop! You have a bar for what you’re willing to do, and mine is all the way at the bottom. Things just don’t bother me or gross me out.

My great-grandmother was born in Japan, and my grandmother and my father were born and raised in Kauai. Being part Japanese adds another element to modeling, especially in Iowa, where the population for minorities is so low. There’s a Colombian model and a Laotian model here, so it’s kind of a joke among us when the call goes out for these jobs—which minority are they going to pick? And for scenes with couples, there are people they’ll always pair together and people they never will. Last commercial I did, I was paired with a guy who was just Mexican enough. They’ll pair me with a black man, but they don’t pair a black man and a white woman together—I’ve never seen that for a commercial shoot. I’m half Czech also, but they use me for the Asian slot, and then they try to Asian me up. They’ll tell the makeup artist, Can you make her look just a little more Asian? It’s like, I know we’re filling the Asian slot, but we’ve got to make sure it actually looks like she is. 

All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq, Miyoko Hikiji, History Publishing Company, 2013; available in Barnes & Noble bookstores and online

On Uniformity

One thing I thought was funny was pajamas. All the guys slept in their brown T-shirt or just their boxer shorts, because it’s not like guys wear pajamas; that wouldn’t be acceptable in that world. But all the women had pajamas! And it was always something funny, like Rainbow Brite or Hello Kitty or something. At that point in the night we just wanted to be girls. On active duty, if it was a three-day weekend, you could wear civilian clothes to the final formation before being cut loose for the weekend. The guys looked basically the same—they’d wear jeans and a T-shirt, but they wouldn’t really look different. But if I showed up in a dress, they just couldn’t believe it! Women can have a lot more faces than men can have—men can’t change their appearance the same way women can, especially in a situation where they all have short hair. But a woman really does look a lot different in her civilian clothes, and I was one of only a few women in a unit that had just opened its ranks to women when I first joined in ’95. So the guys kind of looked at me like, Is that really the same person? I think it confronted them a bit about who exactly I was.

There was also a conflict around presenting a different face to myself. When I was wearing a uniform I felt a little tougher, like I was blending in better with the guys. I didn’t really look like them, but at least I looked more like them than when I was wearing civilian clothes. And when I’d be in a situation where I’d look nicer, sometimes I wouldn’t even tell people that I was in the army—sometimes I would, if I was in a mood to challenge stereotypes. But the two identities don’t seem to fit well because of the stereotypes we have—tough people are supposed to look gritty and dirty and cut-up with tattoos. And then people who are attractive—well, that’s not supposed to be tough at all. The movie G.I. Jane was a terrible depiction of that. Even though it tried to be a girl power movie, in order for Demi Moore to be one of the guys, she had to look like a guy. She had to shave her head because that was how she could reach that level.

I think that’s a real issue in the military—and in our society—about beauty and gender stereotypes, that pretty can’t be tough. It became kind of a side mission of mine. Whenever anyone entered the room and said, “Hey guys,” I’d say, “Wait, what about me?” They’d say, “Oh, you know we mean you too.” Well, no, not really, because I’m not a guy. I wanted to point out that I’m doing the same job, but I’m not really one of you. That’s okay, we’re different—as far as the mission is concerned we’re basically equal, but we do do things differently. It’s not a bad thing!

But let’s recognize who is it that the women are, because a lot of times I think we feel women have to be assimilated into manhood as a promotion into soldierhood, because we don’t think about soldiers as being women. We just think about them as being men. In the beginning I was so eager to assimilate and be accepted. I was okay with losing a bit of identity because I was becoming this new and different and better person—I was going to be a soldier and that was more important to me at the time than preserving some sort of identity as a woman. But by the time it got to the end of my military career I looked at things differently. In Iraq, on laundry day there would be clothes hanging out on lines that people would just string up wherever you could find a space, and some women had Victoria’s Secret underwear and lacy bras. At first I thought, What in the world? I don’t need a wedgie in the middle of a mission. But by the end it made sense to me, because we lost everything while we were there.

We lost our privacy; we lost a lot of our dignity. We were asked to do things that people probably shouldn’t be asked to do. So if you can hang onto something that is meaningful to you—whether that represents your femininity or your strength or your individuality, which we lost also—then what difference does it really make? It means something to them. Everybody has to find their thing to help get them through. You know, men don’t have to drop a lot of their stuff when they get deployed, but there’s a lot of pressure on women to change, to fill those soldiers’ shoes. The military uniform takes away women’s body shape; you don’t really have hips anymore, or a bust. It makes you realize how much just being a woman and being seen as a woman, let alone being attractive, plays into your life, because suddenly all that’s kind of gone.

Beauty Blogosphere Summer Solstice 2013

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

Swedish-American artist Annika Connor, looking all midsummer maiden.

From Head...
Midsummer night's dream: It's midsummer! Don't you want to make a wreath of fresh flowers and dance like a wood nymph? Yes, you do. Here's how.

...To Toe...
Bodily harm: [Unexpectedly heavy content ahead] I'm not sure what to think of this report of a domestic violence attack: After waking up to find that his girlfriend had painted his toenails in his sleep, 25-year-old Dominic Hodson proceeded to beat her for two hours. It's horrifying, and it goes without saying that nothing can "make" an abuser launch into an attack; abusers will find whatever reason they need. Her actions were not a provocation. That said: Isn't it a form of abuse to invade someone's sense of bodily ownership? To assert physical control for someone else—especially when the person is asleep and can't consent—is a form of control that sounds like it would be at home on a list of abusive behaviors. There's also a humiliation factor here—that's the whole point of a prank, after all—which is another form of abuse. To be clear, I'm not blaming the victim here or saying she "deserved" it, or anything of the sort. What this illustrates to me is the ways intimate partner violence often works: Not as a cut-and-dried case of a big bad abuser hulking over a woman, but as a breakdown of boundaries. Once the boundary of physical violence has been crossed—and it's important here that Hodson had a prior history of abusing his girlfriend, according to her statement—there are few boundaries left to violate. Even the person who is not the primary aggressor can wind up crossing boundaries in a way that falls under the umbrella of abuse.


...And Everything In Between:
Closer to fine: Revlon is paying an $850,000 fine for withholding information in a going-private transaction in 2009, an act that can have "coercive effects on minority shareholders," according to an associate director in the Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement division. This reputedly has nothing to do with why the company's CFO resigned this week to become CFO at media company Tribune.

MAC attack: Target offered to settle with MAC for accidentally selling fake products with their name; Lady Mac then snubbed the offer, and the legal catfight continues.

Yours truly: With customization being a boom business for everything from sneakers to eyeglasses, could cosmetics be next in line?

Sweet: Love that there's a beauty company featuring natural products targeted at teens—that was created by real! live! teens! Shouldn't every girl have the right to smell like Crazy Caramel Corn or Iced Lemon Cookie without loading up on parabens and the like?

Snow job: We've established that the media loves to focus on pretty ladies for no reason other than that they're pretty. But Naomi Wolf—whose work has been instrumental in people realizing things like how the media loves to focus on pretty ladies for no reason other than that they're pretty—suspects that the consistent mention of Ed Snowden's sexy pole-dancing girlfriend may actually indicate that Snowden is a plant from Big Brother.

Making amends: It would be pretty cool if the whole story about the Paul Frank collaboration with American Indian designers Louie Gong, Candace Halcro, Dustin Martin, and Autumn Dawn Gomez was that Paul Frank wanted to...collaborate with American Indian designers (instead of, say, just slapping the word Navajo on a product that had naught to do with actual Navajo people). But I think it's doubly cool that the whole story behind the new Paul Frank collection is more complicated: After being called out on their "Dream Catchin'" "Pow Wow" event by Native blogs Beyond Buckskin and Native Appropriations, the company went beyond the standard apology/fauxpology and genuinely engaged with the bloggers and the Native fashion community. Adrienne of Native Appropriations is pretty happy about this, but seeing as how critical examination of, um, native appropriations is literally the name of her game, she also brings up some points that could make things even better.

C'mon, baby, gimme a smile: Katy Waldman at Slate takes the hilarious Bitchy Resting Face video a step farther, connecting it to the "the laser grid of unspoken rules governing the arrangement of male and female faces—the gendered ways we police social performance." (Thanks to Joy for the link!)

Lighten up: You know how pretty much every beauty piece about "paring down" your products is usually just a list of products? With water heading this blissfully short list of genuinely low-fuss beauty "supplies," this one actually earns its claim to low maintenance.

Cop to it: The takeaway from recent findings that copper is more damaging to our hair than previously realized is that soon we're going to be seeing all sorts of "copper cleansing" shampoos on the market. Give it nine months, I predict.

Boy George: ahead of his time.

Generation Y: Okay, so it's not like 18% of young men are actually wearing foundation, but 18% of millennials say it would be acceptable for them to do so.

Bodily amendments: The case of a Minneapolis man who was arrested after getting a tattoo depicting a gun in the mouth of a pig, complete with a specific Minneapolis police officer's name and badge number, begs the question of whether tattoos are considered speech that incites a real and present threat to another person—or are simply forms of personal expression.

Modesty, boys!: You know, if men don't want women to ogle them, they shouldn't act the ways they do. Take some tips from June.

For shame: I plead guilty to mentally stereotyping women who get cosmetic surgery. Rather, I did so until I learned years ago that a close friend had gotten a nose job before we met, thus turning my entire world of "sellouts" vs. "non-sellouts" upside-down and I began to realize that the whole thing was a bit more complicated and that maybe I shouldn't be all Judge Judy. ("Beauty work can be fun! Unless it's something I don't approve of.") Kate lays out why getting surgery needn't be a shameful act.

Also, smoke them: Contrary to my previously held belief, I indeed have not read every beauty tip known to womankind. Exhibit A: Whiten your teeth with banana peels.

Ignorant beauties: Sure, there's something uniquely charming about people who appear to be genuinely unaware of their physical appeal. But why are all these boys singing about how not knowing you're beautiful is what makes you beautiful? (Don't they know that every woman has a doctorate in her own sex-powers?)

But I would like a lipstick shade called I Hate the Patriarchy #2: To be annoyed or amused by this "feminist makeup tutorial"? Funny quips (like about applying foundation with "equal representation") don't make up for the anti-man sentiments contained therein, which might be remotely amusing (though probably not) if feminists weren't already mistakenly stereotyped as man-haters. Survey says: annoyed. (Thanks to ModernSauce for the link!)

Budding beauties: An East Harlem garden whose beds are made out of recycled Garnier beauty packaging materials is estimated to yield 1,500 pounds of vegetables a year. Presumably all 1,500 pounds will be cucumbers, because puffy eyes.

Refashioning race: New York readers: Between the Threadbared ladies and Pricing Beauty author Ashley Mears, this panel discussion June 25 promises to be fascinating. It's practically just a bonus that the topic is meaty: exploring race, gender, and economy through the lens of the digital age and alternative fashion. Join me?

Nail it: Chicago readers, take note of the Nailed exhibit from artist Helen Maurene Cooper at Cith Gallery, featuring portraits of nail salon technicians and patrons as well as a collection of macro photos of truly fantastic nail art. (via Britt Julious, whose feature on Cooper is worth a read)

Hair history: This stop-motion depiction of European women's hairstyles (plus some early neolithic and Egyptian styles for good measure) is downright mesmerizing (via Stuff Mom Never Told You).

Loki's Lacquer: The blogger asks herself if she's bending her principles by pointing readers to a product she hasn't actually tried yet—nay, products in general!—but when the goodie in question is a nail polish named after one of her favorite beauty bloggers, The Reluctant Femme, it's totally principled, right? Or is she just yielding to the shimmery blackish purplish greenish pinkish siren song? Either way, it's gorgeous.

How to Make a Midsummer Floral Wreath

Technically, you can celebrate Midsummer without a floral wreath. (Nobody will ban you from the maypole.) But why would you want to turn down a chance to fete your inner woodland nymph? Celebrate the biggest Swedish holiday with this feminine combination of earthy and ethereal delights. Each year at the weekend nearest to the summer solstice—instead of being on the solstice, so everyone can stay out late dancing around maypoles and eating gravlax—Sweden gets its groove on. Swedish women traditionally make floral wreaths to wear in their hair for Midsummer’s Day, and Swedish-American artist Annika Connor, who grew up making floral wreaths every year for Midsummer, shows us how.

You will need:

• Flowers; one mid-size arrangement with approximately 20 blooms  

• Baby’s breath or similar

• 4-5 greenery stems (the long stems of green leaves you can get at the florist)

• Scissors

• Florist wire (at craft stores); those of you who stop reading when you see “craft stores” can just use thread

• Swedish picnic food—why not?! Think potatoes, gravlax, herring, strawberries and cream, Kalles caviar spread, Knäckebröd, and elderflower saft

1) Find flowers.

Were we living in rural Sweden, we’d go for a walk on Midsummer Eve and pick buttercups and clover along the way. However, you probably live in an urban jungle, so a walk to the florist has to suffice. Things to keep in mind when selecting flowers:

• No pollen! Yes, lilies are gorgeous, but you really don’t want their pollen on your head.

• Keep the blooms relatively small. Think carnations and statice, which dries particularly nicely; something like an iris or freesia (with blooms about half-dollar size) is as big as you want to go, unless you want to be wearing Birds of Paradise on your head all night, in which case may whimsy be your guide.

• Sorry, but no roses. You will miss a thorn.

• Fragrance: Fresh floral wreath will make dashing strangers want to smell your hair, and since Midsummer is a romantic holiday, you may as well help things along.

 • Unmarried women: If you fetch the flowers the night on Midsummer's Eve, put seven of them—all different varieties—under your pillow. Swedish legend has it that you'll then dream of your future husband.

2) “Clean” the flowers.
Keep the stems long, but trim away excess leaves and buds, so that you have long stems with a single bloom at the top. See the before and after of this carnation stem:

3) Begin the structural base.
Overlap three pieces of the greenery, staggering them in length so that you have one big greenery stem that’s about 1.5 times longer than each individual stem would be. Secure the bundle every few inches with florist wire or thread, winding the thread throughout so that you’re not stopping to trim it all the time.

4) Add flowers.
Add a cleaned flower stem to the bundle of greenery and secure with the florist wire or thread. Be sure to bind flower stems to the stems of the greenery without trapping the leaves in the thread; this will keep it more secure and lush-looking.

Continue to add the cleaned flower stems, occasionally adding in a stem of greenery. Things to keep in mind:

• Composition: Alternate colors without making it too bridal-perfect, adding in baby’s breath every so often to keep the whole thing looking ethereal.

• Thickness: The bundled stems should be a little less than an inch in diameter, which can mean anywhere from 15 to 25 stems bound together at any point along the wreath, depending on what flowers you’re using.

• Inside versus outside: When you’re bundling the flowers, you want all the blooms to be facing outward, so that when you put it on your head you have only the stems on your hair, not the blooms. Like this:

5) Shape the wreath. 

When the bundle is about a foot and a half long, begin to shape it into a circle. You don’t need to keep the circle shape as you continue to add flowers and greenery; you just want to bend it every so often to make sure it’s flexible.

6) Drink.
“You never really feel like you know what you’re doing,” said Annika when I kept asking her about precise measurements and whatnot. She said this while wearing a 19th-century Swedish gown, after having purchased kringla at Fika—in fluent Swedish—earlier in the day. Moral is: Relax. Making the wreath should ideally be as social as the big event itself: Gather some friends and make it a happening. You went to Ikea and picked up some elderflower saft, right? If you choose to add Absolut, your secret is safe with me.

7) Measure. 
When the wreath is around two feet long, shape it into a circle and wrap it around your head. If it’s a little short, keep weaving flowers and greenery until it’s the right length. If it seems about right, use the florist wire or thread to secure the stems of the last flowers you added to the beginning of the bundle to create a circle. Put it on top of your head again: You want it to sit far down enough that it won’t slide off.

8) Secure and finish. Once it’s the right size, reinforce the final binding with the thread. Then weave in a couple more flowers over the closure to cover it, choosing blooms on short stems.

9) Preserve your handiwork.
Ideally, we would all have just-picked flowers in our hair, all the time, forever and ever. However, you can make the wreath a day ahead of time, then lightly mist it with water and refrigerate it. Alternately, you can make the wreath as described and then hang it on a doorknob to dry. If you know you’ll be drying your wreath, don’t choose white blooms, as they’ll turn brown as they dry. Fantastic if you're aiming for eccentric dowager, but let's be thinking maypole maiden here, shall we?

 Photo: Jennifer Calais Smith

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Elsewhere at The Beheld:

     My Month Without Mirrors

     On the Birthday of Anne Frank 

     A History of the Bombshell