BEAUTY IS PAIN?

In one week, I will be on a beach in Florida, soaking up some rays and knowledge. I decided it would be a good time to use the rest of my gift certificate for the nail salon (see previous post - "Just What the Doctor Never Ordered). There is a good likelihood I will be getting some beach time with my friend from another work site that I might want to work with some day, so having professional looking nails seemed like a good idea.

This time the place was dead, so I had two women working on me at once, one at my feet and one working on my hands. They of course went for the upsale at once (see Anjela Johnson's Nail Salon jokes). They tried to sell me the deluxe package, which I declined, but then one looked up and suggested an eyebrow wax. "Show off your eyes, make you look pretty", she says. She then says something in Vietnamese to her coworker, which I think was a comment on my appearance, and the one working on my hands quickly looked at me with pity in her eyes, which guided me to think it was not flattering. I was not really concerned with this, and I mentioned to them that getting my eyebrows done "always hurts a little bit".

"Oh honey, but beauty IS pain."

My immediate thought was, So that's what I've been doing wrong these years! Which was a joke to self, really. In my honest reflections, I know that I am not as pretty as I used to be, and in my darker moments, I mourn the loss of my beauty. When I say things like that, people assume I mean that I don't feel good about my appearance, but it is not that at all. I am comfortable with what I consider as my "reasonably attractive" appearance. Like most people, I have good and bad days. I can put on the shine and look nice, and I can look downright ugly.

However, I can tell that I am not as attractive as I once was because of the way people respond to me. We like to tell ourselves we don't judge people on their appearance, but it does factor in to the way people treat you. People don't treat me the way they used to.

In my younger years, I learned how to use the power of my sexuality to get what I wanted from people. It was a trick in the toolbox of manipulation that I wasn't really aware of how to use until college, but then I perfected it. I would go to bars with no money in my pockets, knowing full well I could get drinks by flirting with men. My attractiveness worked on women as well, helping me to impress during interviews and work the networking ladder. It was especially helpful in getting me out of speeding tickets. I talked my way out of thirteen tickets during the years of my physical prime, but nowadays, the cops take one look and they start writing the ticket before I even start talking.

I know that some of it is age and life experience. I see the biggest differences in my appearance in my face and my weight. I can see it in my face most clearly. When I look at pictures of myself from five to ten years ago, I see how much smoother the skin on my face was. There is an absence of lines and blemishes that seem to appear around the time I had my first child and increase exponentially through the years despite my skin care regime. I am carrying fifty, sixty pounds more than I was back then, which I can blame on having two kids, my metabolism slowing down, the lack of a proper exercise schedule, poor diet, and/or my overriding desires for cheeseburgers. Stress and hormones haven't treated me well.

Even so, though, I don't feel bad about the way I look, I just notice things are different for me. I think there are nice features about myself that still get noticed. When I met Indy's girlffriend for the first time, she slid into the seat next to me and said sweetly, "You're really pretty." I smiled at her and replied, "Thanks, so are you!" I had put on the makeup and the nice dress that night, but most days I don't bother, because I am not that concerned with my physical appearance. I would rather someone find me I was smart or interesting than attractive.

Perhaps, though, these girls in the nail salon are right. I coasted along in my prime years off of what God gave me. I never really had to work at being attractive, and I haven't really ever endured pain for the sake of it. The closest I have come to feeling a true understanding that "beauty IS pain" might be some brutally intense physical workouts. I have an obsessive mind and sometimes it focuses on exercise, and during those times, I lost thirty to forty pounds pounding the streets, treadmills, and stairmasters of various gyms around town for a year or so before losing interest and moving on to the next obssessive behavior (which very possibly could be cheeseburgers again, leading me into some vicious get fit-get fat-and-back-again cycle).

I haven't sacrificed for beauty, and in some way in the back of my mind, I think maybe we shouldn't have to. I mean, what is the function of beauty anyway, as I am fond of asking? At the heart of this is a philosophical debate that I could elaborate on but will choose not to in the interest of brevity (brevity, she says? What does she know about brevity, laughs my inner jokester). In my opinion, the function of beauty is to find a mate. Does it really matter if anyone else finds you attractive other than your mate? Does beauty simply rely on external factors, or is it a combination of a number of features? Does beauty exist in a vacuum?

In thinking about beauty in the terms of relationship with one's mate, let me examine two statements made by my husband regarding beauty. One day we were looking through a tabloid magazine, and there was a page with several fresh-faced Hollywood women. He went through and pointed out which ones he found to be more attractive, who were not the more conventional choices. "You wanna know why I picked these ones?" he said, "It's because these women are smiling. These ones over here look unhappy. To me, what makes a woman beautiful is when they are happy inside, and you can see it on their face. This is a woman you want to be around."

I thought of another time he made a statement about beauty. Those who know our recent history have heard the story about our Great Flood Story, when we had to be rescued by boat when a river flowed into our campsite in the middle of the night. We had only made it to safety by pushing each other through the shoulder-deep water to our vehicle and climbing on top. As the waters raged around us, I held my ten month old baby to my chest, hair dank with river water in the dark of the night, and prayed that God would help us get out safely. My husband said later, "You never looked as beautiful to me as you did at that moment."

Clearly my husband has an unconventional idea of beauty, or perhaps he, as others do, understands that beauty is "more than skin deep", that "beauty is as beauty does", and half a number of the other cliched statements we make but yet have trouble living by. Over the recent years, I have come to see that my husband's attraction for me has less to do with what I look like, and everything to do with how I act. A smile and kind words goes further with him than fresh makeup and a tight sweater.

I went ahead, though, and agreed to a little bit of pain for my beauty today, telling them that since it was my wedding anniversary, I did want to look nice, and so perhaps an eyebrow wax might be beneficial. It does seem rather odd to me, though, that today's standards of beauty involve the removal of hair from places God allowed it to grow. I think if God intended for us to perceive beauty as freshly waxed, shaved, and plucked body parts, then wouldn't He just stop it from growing? Of course I am being facetious, but at the same time don't understand a society that places value on false appearances - fake tans, nails, breasts, hair. Why can't we be happy with the way God made us, individual yet all beautiful in our own natural way?
I could write an entire essay on what I think is wrong with cultural standards of beauty and how it affects women and their self esteem. But not tonight. Tonight I am going to shave my legs. I am going to style my hair, put on my makeup and jewelry, and prepare to go on a romantic date with my husband to celebrate our ninth wedding anniversary. I'm going to put on my cutest outfit and bring out my most beautiful self. Before I walk away from the vanity, though, I going to put on the finishing touch, the one last special touch - a genuine smile. It might be the sexiest thing I'm wearing tonight.