Heather, Blogger, Denver

When I first stumbled upon Faces of Beauty, I was mesmerized. I’m a chronic voyeur, preferring to (discreetly, but of course!) watch people on the subway rather than Sudoku, so any collection of faces is basically catnip to me. But what makes this different than a mere photo gallery is what each photo subject says about herself: Woman after woman proclaiming not only that she is beautiful, but why she’s beautiful. We see Clare honor her father’s rosy cheeks and her mother’s undereye circles; we see Katie define her beauty in verbs only; we see Alexia simply state, “I am beautiful because I say I am.”

Heather Disarro is the woman who gives Clare, Katie, Alexia, and dozens more beautiful women their voice on Faces of Beauty. After 14 years of struggling with disordered eating, Heather was able to see through the truth she’d been denying herself: Beautiful as-is, she’d been robbing herself for those years of the chance to spread her message of beauty. “We’re never promised tomorrow, and I’m not wasting one more second of this precious life...letting someone else...be the defining factor of whether or not I’m beautiful!” she writes. Heather wrote to me about her reasons for starting the blog, the role her religion has played in her path to self-acceptance, and why the “elevator meeting” might be triggering a spate of unhealthy behaviors. In her own words:  

 

On Blogging Beauty
The goal of Faces of Beauty is to bring about a revolution in the way we see ourselves. There are so many women who think they need to be a certain size, wear certain clothes, wear makeup, and conform to a certain look to be beautiful, when in fact the entire reason they are beautiful in the first place is due to their specific, unique, individual beauty. I think that even though we all feel that we should strive for a certain kind of beauty, we are still hesitant to claim it. Faces of Beauty asks you to shout out loud that you are beautiful!

More than anything it's been really cool for me to see what people love about themselves.  I think we focus so much on what we LOOK like on the outside and never really take the time to see what's beautiful on the inside. As Sophia Loren once said, "Beauty is how you feel on the inside and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical." I've seen that quote reflected in the things that women have said about themselves on the blog more than anything else, and it's been the biggest blessing!

On Faith
As a Christian I fully admit that I am sinful; my sin and my “god” for the longest time was trying to look a certain way, appear a certain way, be a certain way. But the fact that Christ died for my sins and I’ve been set free from a life of slavery to that sin is huge. I am free, I am loved, and I am beautiful because I am born anew in Christ, and not because of anything that I have done. I would say that it plays a very large part in me learning to love myself and in my becoming the woman I am today.

Psalm 45:1 reads: “The king is enthralled with your beauty; honor him, for he is your lord.” More than anything this passage is a reminder to me that my allegiance is to God, and nothing else...not myself, not my husband, not my looks. I'm to honor God above all else! If beauty is the one thing you worry about it and it's an all-consuming thing, that's not healthy. I would call that a sin, as I would anything that is an all-consuming issue.

I don't think we should judge anyone as we're called to love all people. I am a sinner, we are all sinners, and whether it's vanity, eating issues, adultery, pornography, whatever...it's all the same in God's eyes. As for how to find the middle ground, I think the biggest thing for me was learning over time that I don't need to wear makeup or a certain pant size to be beautiful. Honestly there were a lot of stops along the way, but it was really a factor of time and love from others that made me realize how beautiful I am...and I don't have to try.

On “Getting the Look You Want”
I think that we’ve become a culture where the “elevator meeting”—what can you find out about someone in the time it takes to ride an elevator—has become the norm, and therefore physical appearance plays a large role in that. We also are completely surrounded by media that portrays women in a very unrealistic way, but since there’s no equally matched authority saying that we’re beautiful as we are, we tend to accept what’s immediately in front of us. Being “beautiful” feels accessible all the time, and if you don’t like your look? Just save enough money and have surgery. It’s much more acceptable to do that now, and just the other day I heard an ad for MakeDenverBeautiful.com. Sounds like an environmental organization—but it’s a plastic surgeon’s office advising people to “come in and get the look you want.”

When I started reading Teen and Seventeen magazines I was probably around 13-14 years old.  If I were looking back on me now, I was at a fairly awkward point then, sporting braces and frizzy hair and trying to keep up with the latest fashion trends. At the time I didn’t realize that I had a longer torso, closer-set hips, and broad, athletic shoulders. I saw that my body looked different, and attempted to act accordingly. The thing is that I was adorable just like that, and I hope that my daughters (if I have any) are able to see the beauty in their awkwardness!

On Makeup
I wake up every morning and wash my face. I apply mascara when I’m going to work or church, and otherwise tend to go without. I brush my teeth, apply moisturizer, and curl my eyelashes.  That’s about it! When I was younger I tried doing the full beauty routine with concealer, powder, blush, and the full gamut in eye makeup, but when I entered college and was working out regularly I just decided it would be easier to stick with mascara—waterproof so it didn't run when I was running—and that habit has just stuck with me. It's not that I think makeup is bad; I think it's the attitude that it's worn with. I don't mind playing with it from time to time, but I know in my heart that I don't NEED it to be beautiful.

On Her Blog’s Tagline: “Do You Believe That You Are Truly Beautiful?”
YES! :)

One Small Face of Beauty

I'm the face of the day over at facesofbeauty.org, a site that features (mostly) self-portraits of women in no or little makeup along with a writeup of why they're beautiful. Check it out! (It's much classier than my most recent use of my self-portrait, on top of the fruit. I can't believe nobody called me out on that ridiculousness.)

Stay tuned for my interview with the founder, Heather Disarro, coming up!

Apple Shape, Pear Shape, Bull Shape

I am not a pear. Nor am I an apple, or an hourglass. I’m not a pencil, or a triangle, or a bell, or a rectangle.

But how does she dress herself in the morning? you gasp. My god, how does she know whether to wear skirts at or above the knee? frills at the bust or at the hem? can she “get away with” a wrap dress? a cinch waist? BOOT-LEG OR FLARE?

Women's magazines assume that after decades of fruitspeak, every American woman knows by right where her botanical destiny lies; just in case there’s the odd raised-by-wolves type who needs to figure out her best dress shape, of course, there’s often a brief guide: You are to look in the mirror and assess which fruit your silhouette most accurately resembles. Oh, the terms might vary: You’re not a pear, you’re a spoon! You’re not a banana or boy-shaped—nay, you are a ruler! (Actually, in magazines’ defense not many of them try to get away with “banana” any longer, perhaps recognizing that few of their readers were long, curveless creatures whose hips perpetually jutted to the left.) Hourglass, of course, never changes; despite the thin-imperative, all of the corrective clothing picks in the “dress your shape” magazine columns are designed to basically make us mimic the hourglass shape if we don’t have it naturally. (Not to be left out of the not-quite-good-enough game, of course, “hourglass” women are sometimes recast as “busty,” in which case the page focuses on “minimizing” and controlling the mighty mammaries.)

If looking in the mirror doesn’t help you? You could try asking strangers on the Internet (Google “am i a pear or an apple” for further assistance); you could consult Wikipedia. I once actually started plugging things like my wrist circumference into an online form to determine once and for all what fucking fruit I am, but stopped when I realized I was crazy-making, and now I can’t find it, but it exists. In general, waist-hip ratio is generally agreed upon as the determining factor of pear versus apple. This might work fine and dandy for the bitsy newsy health tip about how apples are all going to die of something tomorrow, if they haven't already. (Can we make apples and pears Health at Any Size’s next battle? I can't believe that every apple out there is going to get diabetes.) But in any case, it does squat for the woman who’s deemed a pear by the measuring tape, but in fact just has a curvy booty as opposed to wide hips.

Am I alone in never, ever having fit a single one of these categories? My hips aren’t quite wide enough for me to be a pear, I’m a little too curvy to be a banana, my waistline doesn’t qualify me as an apple, and I’m not busty enough to be an hourglass. More to the point, am I alone in having this sort of magnetic attraction-repulsion to the idea that there’s this set of guidelines that determines our “type,” like a personality flow chart for your figure? It’s this weird little corner of magazines that feels specifically tailored for you—I mean, look, there are FOUR DIFFERENT “REAL WOMEN” on this page, and one of them is probably even not-white (it's a favorite place for ladymags to cram in some "diversity"), so clearly She is We, and We are She, and this magazine and I are totally vibing—but that actually has nada to do with how you might look in puffed-sleeve blouses (pears), flared jeans (apples, I think?), or high necklines (bananas!).

 Late-night Photoshoppin': Don't tell me I don't know how to party.

It’s a categorization that shows us, more blatantly than other tools in women’s magazines, to view our bodies as problem zones. The savvier fashion writers  tell you to play up your good parts instead of  trying to hide the bad, but in some ways that echoes the notion of telling a heavy-set woman “Oh, but you’ve got such a pretty face” as a supposed compliment—as though now she must do something to “match” her “good points.”

Now, listen, I’ve got nothing against dressing to flatter your figure. I do it every day (please leave polite, anonymous comments if I am grossly mistaken). Scoop necklines, boot-cut jeans, stretchy pencil skirts, and faux-wrap dresses line my closet, because they’re what make me look the best. They visually create a nicer picture than, say, empire dresses and flare-legged jeans would on me. (Did the Powers That Be just want to temper my bohemian bent by forcing me into J.Crew?) And I’m guessing that for many women who don’t trust their visual sense or their instincts, or who just want some guidelines, that those pages are truly helpful. They're sure as shit popular, a perennial high scorer in magazine metrics.

But you know what? I am about the least fashion-conscious person out there, and I figured this stuff out. (Of course, that could be part of why; when you only care about what looks flattering instead of staying on-trend, it’s easier to find what works for you. Some call my wardrobe boring; I vote “classic.”) It’s not because I pay attention to the magazines that I figured out what worked on me: It’s because I look in the mirror. I made a vow several years ago—around the same that I began to suspect that this whole apple-pear thing was largely bullshit designed to appear "helpful" but wasn't really—that I wasn’t going to buy any clothing that didn’t give me an immediate “yes.” Voilà, a wardrobe was born: Within a year of this decision, my closet was filled with pretty much nothing but the items above. My fashion guidelines don’t flatter a single piece of fruit, but they flatter me just fine.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t pay attention to the magazines, though. Did I ever. From my first issue of Seventeen until I figured out a few years ago that I was neither apple nor pear nor hourglass but a cornucopia, I memorized every pear-shaped and plus-sized trick in the book, despite not being either of those. Like so many issues surrounding body image, what I actually looked like wasn’t what the issue. My light case of body dysmorphia (just a cough, really) dictated that I fixated on the size of my thighs, which are certainly ample but A) aren’t hips, and B) aren’t broad enough to make me resemble a classic d’Anjou. But the closest thing I could seize upon to fix this perceived flaw was the pear. And, of course, I cleverly deduced that in order to look smaller (which, at certain points in my life, took on a vastly inappropriate importance), one should read the “plus” section. I spent years never even trying on pencil skirts, because they only worked for hourglass figures and I was a pear, right?, instead “preferring” A-line skirts that never felt quite right.

I didn’t really realize how much my old perceived flaws had dictated the way I dressed, though, until I saw a hint of it elsewhere. I'm reading the blog of my friend Andréa, who’s doing the 30 for 30 challenge, in which you pick 30 items from your closet and wear only those; she’s using it as a way of challenging herself to wear things that are out of her comfort zone. She casually mentioned that one of her combinations was a personal challenge because it emphasized her “boy shape,” and it threw me for a loop to see someone who is most definitely shaped like a woman (what else could we be shaped like? oh, yes, fruit and spoons) describe herself that way—especially because she looked fantastic in the item in question, a studded belt. 

Andréa’s studded belt, my years with no pencil skirts, a vintage color-block dress I bought but never wore because the saleslady told me as she handed it over that “only an hourglass can get away with this” (encouragement or admonishment? it didn’t matter; I disqualified myself from being its wearer and gave it away): What are we missing out on because of our ingrained notions of what actually suits us? Add to this a tidbit that Beauty Schooled recently posted on Facebook about how nobody actually has a waist—it’s a tailoring term, not an anatomical one—and all of a sudden it’s beginning to look like we’ve been wearing the emperor’s clothes for a while now.

Colette Nelson, Professional Bodybuilder, New York City

Mention the name Colette Nelson in bodybuilding circles and you can pretty much guarantee the response will be smiles of recognition all around. Over the years she has carved a niche for herself as one of the most respected and admired professional athletes on the circuit. However, what few people realize is that competitive bodybuilding is only one string attached to this woman’s bow: Colette is also a registered dietician and certified diabetes educator, holds a master’s degree in science—and still manages to fit being a hair and makeup artist into her demanding lifestyle. (She also happens to be a bit of an artist when it comes to spray tanning…)

 Photo: Kyle Quest Studios

But it’s the bodybuilding that intrigued me the most, as she’s one of the few competitors who manages to combine extreme muscularity with extreme femininity, which has likely been a key to her astounding success in the sport (check out her site for a rundown of her contest history)—and it’s what made me want to delve deeper into the phenomena of female muscle as the possible new face of beauty. In her own words:

On the Beauty of Bodybuilding
Bodybuilding—at least women’s bodybuilding—is simply a new way of judging beauty. They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and for those who attend and judge women’s bodybuilding contests, the muscular woman is beautiful. Call her a female Adonis if you will. Now, this may seem like a somewhat arrogant statement but let’s stop to consider this: Do you call the woman who spends hours in front of the mirror doing her makeup arrogant? Of course not, so why should we give this label to the woman who works out hard in the gym and then chooses to display the results on stage? Both are seeking what they deem to be perfection. 

Some may think it’s a huge contradiction and that muscle and femininity—or indeed beauty—cannot go hand in hand. I like to think that in some small way, I and women like me are proving that muscle can be both feminine and beautiful. The qualification to that statement is, of course, as long as it doesn’t go to the extremes of drug use, which many women fall victim to. I’ve never been an advocate of drug use, and yet I have had a very successful career in bodybuilding. I’ve gone about as far as I can go without sacrificing my femininity, which I am never willing to do.

On Femininity
Yes, some women may fall into the trap of taking drugs that threaten their femininity in an attempt to be “bigger and better” than their rivals. And the price they pay is significant—it’s emotionally traumatizing. It’s not unknown for women to begin losing their hair due to “male pattern baldness” and have to shave every day to remove significant facial hair growth. It’s not my place to judge or criticize these women—but should they ask for it, I can offer them my help. That’s how I got involved in the hair and makeup side of competitions. I’m not saying that all my clients are trying to cover up masculinizing side effects of drug use, but there are a small percentage of women for whom this is true and those were the first ones I helped. Now I do hair and make up for all contest categories, from bodybuilding to figure and bikini.

As a female bodybuilder you walk a fine line. You love muscle, and yet you love being a woman at the same time. I have always embraced my feminine side. I love doing my hair, makeup, nails….and I love fashion. Go figure! I think that is what makes me interesting—being a sexy girl with muscles. I may not be the biggest girl when I compete, but I do have decent size. I am just not willing to sacrifice my femininity for size. I also think that more women would be interested in looking like Jillian Michaels with that type of body than to go to the extremes of muscle size that can only be achieved with significant drug use.

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Supplements
I have to touch on the drug issue because, like it or not, it is a part of the sport of bodybuilding. For myself, I have never considered bodybuilding to be my career, so I was never willing to take it to that extreme. You don’t make money in the sport—you make it from offshoots of the sport, be that modeling for fitness magazines, movie work, or whatever. You need to focus on the big picture, and when you take drugs the big picture outside the sport can go from poster to thumbnail size.

In addition, I have a career as a dietician and diabetes educator. I need to be conscious of the image I present to both patients and fellow professionals. For me, drug use would be professional suicide—and let’s face it, I did very well during my competitive career without them!

On Contest Prep
Contest preparation begins about 16 weeks before a show. You start becoming more aware of your hair, your skin, your nails—everything. I don’t color my hair until about two weeks before a competition. That way it’s clean, healthy, and not over-processed. I also exfoliate my skin—more than I would just for myself—to make sure I have no blemishes. I also get facials three weeks before the show and start tanning about 10 weeks prior to competing. I never tan my face—only my body. Tanning can be extremely aging to the skin, and I’m not into that!

 Photo: Dan Ray

On Adolescence
When I was 12 years old I saw pictures in a magazine of Cory Everson and Rachel McLish and liked that look. My dance teacher at the time was muscular and I recall her saying she wanted to be thinner. But I loved those bigger, muscular bodies. Back then I was really skinny—I came from a family of skinny minnies—and I never considered myself as looking good. To me I looked frail and not interesting. At that time I was also diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which made me feel weak, broken—even damaged. I remember asking my doctor what I could do to make this situation better, and he said I had to pay attention to my diet and start working out. So I started going to the gym at a very young age—I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I went! It gave me a feeling of empowerment. I felt stronger and ultimately more accepting of my body. I got hooked on feeling strong.

On “Attention: Bodybuilder Ahead!”
I really don’t use this body I’ve built as a tool to get attention in everyday life…but I have to admit that I do love attention. People make comments—which are for the most part positive—and I get a kick out of how some people respond to me. Like, they always say, “Oh, I want to arm wrestle you.” I live in New York and the people here are very accepting of individualism, so I rarely get negative remarks aimed in my direction. 

People aren’t used to seeing a woman with muscle, though, so they do stare. We aren’t really brought up to know how to respond to a muscular woman. All I know is that it gives me a level of confidence and strength which I was lacking before, and people can feel that from me. That tempers their response.

On Perfection
Bodybuilding challenges our conditioning about what beauty looks like. With a muscular body you are creating art. I was always classed as “pretty,” but I wanted more. I am a total type-A overachiever—I’ve always been that way. And for me, building my body and reducing my body fat was a logical step toward perfection. When you have toned your body, you have altered it, nurtured it, re-created it—and when you are lifting those weights you feel like a superhero. Bodybuilders may seem neurotic in their attention to detail, but who said that trying to achieve an ideal of perfection would be easy? It may not be easy, but is it worth it? Do I really need to answer that?!

 Photo: Ivana Ford

Glamour Gals: Makeover Do-Gooding

There’s an interesting discussion over at Beauty Schooled about Glamour Gals, a nonprofit founded by an ambitious young woman in 2000. The idea of Glamour Gals is that small armies of young women—mostly high school students, though there are college chapters as well—go into nursing homes and give female residents makeovers.

I was inclined initially to feel as Virginia first wrote:

OK, I am a mean horrible person and Oprah loves them. But if you want to volunteer with old folk, can’t you just spend time with them? Do you have to put makeup on them like they five, instead of grown-ass women who have been deciding what looks good on them all by themselves for oh, decades now?

But the comments made me (and the writer) rethink:

It seems kind of, pointless, maybe, BUT – many women, especially older women, really really enjoy getting made up and being made to feel “pretty.” Living in a hospital or assisted living facility can obviously be very, very dreary. Even if it doesn’t actually DO anything, maybe it can make an elderly woman (who maybe can’t do her makeup as well anymore) FEEL happier and better, a little like she did when she was young; and isn’t that worth SOMETHING?

It’s not easy for everyone to interact with people but doing hair and makeup has given me a platform to being more extroverted. Sure, it would be just as valuable if I went to sit and read with the elderly, but this is fun too. I know what I was doing at 17 and it wasn’t nearly this productive.

You’ll see my comment at the bottom there; I was sort of grumbling before I’d had my coffee and that’s not exactly my problem with it (even if I do think that breast cancer activism can take on a faux feminist sheen at times; see Barbara Ehrenreich, who says it much better than I do). So what is my problem with Glamour Girls? I mean, I’ve documented on this very blog how unexpectedly engaged I felt by getting a makeover. Besides the reflections (and lipstick purchases!) it prompted, it also just plain felt nice to sit there and let Eden tend to my face; I can only imagine that feeling would increase tenfold if I were living in an assisted living home, widowed, with few visitors, as is the case with many of the Glamour Gals. I mean, when was the last time you touched your own grandmother’s face? When was the last time you touched anyone’s face but a child’s or a lover’s? (Am I the only one who gets bashful when I brush a fallen eyelash from a friend’s cheek?)

But you know what? This is all conjecture: I wouldn’t know how it feels for the makeover recipients, because they’re invisible on the Glamour Gals site. There are bios and journal entries from volunteers (“Victoria’s First Makeover”—Victoria is the volunteer, not her elderly counterpart), internal and external news tidbits ranging from press to updates on its volunteers (“Marisa Parrotta, chapter president of our Bolton Central School chapter...is a finalist for the NYC teen pageant”), and clips from The Glammys, the organization’s annual awards event. We hear from the Glammys host (style expert Robert Verdi), from the founder, from volunteers, from Oprah. Nowhere do we hear from the senior citizens who are getting services from Glamour Gals. Their voices are literally mute, only static, smiling photographs giving us an illusion of what the senior set might actually feel.

Buried in the site’s “Our Story” section, I did find a news clip from the Metro Channel—that is, something not produced by Glamour Gals itself (though it had a promotional feel to it so perhaps it was a joint project; I don’t know)—in which some of the makeover recipients get a chance to speak. Or, in one case, to wheel over at the volunteer’s prodding to her bureau in order to fetch a Polaroid of the two together. “Do you still have my pictures?” the volunteer chirps.

I suppose it’s really this that bothers me: “my pictures.” I understand that in order to stay afloat, nonprofits need to emphasize their achievements—and upsetting and counterproductive to the group’s goals as it may be—a bevy of fresh-faced 17-year-olds in candy striper aprons may be more palatable to potential donors than elderly women sporting lip stain. And Glamour Girls is vocal about its mission being a two-way street: elderly women receive sorely lacking personal care; young women strengthen their leadership skills. But on page after page, I saw only the volunteer’s voices and nada from the other side of the supposedly mutual exchange. I suspect that Virginia was onto something when she initially pinned it as the “best college application padding activity I’ve seen in a while”—and, criminy, I remember the terror of college applications back in 1994, when it wasn’t as competitive as it is now. I get it. And it’s worth noting that Glamour Gals has been noted by an organization devoted to eldercare: the American Health Care Association named it Group Volunteer of the Year in 2004. That’s encouraging; it shows that there is a real response to the group’s efforts, which isn’t surprising.

The group also deserves props for taking this kind of stuff seriously. When I first heard of this group, I was working at CosmoGirl magazine, which honored Glamour Gals founder Rachel Doyle as its first-ever “CosmoGirl of the Year.” (I’ve never met Rachel but remember that the staff at the time was supportive of her efforts and admired her outreach, marketing, and PR skills, which are remarkable now and certainly were when she was a teen.) I groan-laughed on the inside at the time, because it just seemed so damned appropriate, a teenage girl volunteering by putting makeup on old women, snapping some photos, and gathering a scrapbook. Who could ask for a cuter, sunnier, more winsome story? And, c’mon, the polar ice caps are melting and there’s bride burning and you, Teenage Girl, have very limited access to contraception—but, sure, let’s put makeup on old women and call it a day, okay? But I see that was shortsighted and cynical of me: Beauty is a major concern to a lot of women, and that doesn’t just stop once one’s hair turns gray. For a young woman to grasp that and turn her attention not toward herself and the beauty woes that go along with being a teenage girl, but to an under-served population who could benefit from the simple, human act of course—that’s prescient and gracious, and Doyle’s dedication and ambition have helped perform a small healing for more than 10,000 women. There’s a guileless earnesty here that I regret having rolled my eyes at years ago; Doyle saw something that I’m only now beginning to give credence to.

The founder of the group is now, by my calculations, 27 years old, so I don’t feel like a total Scrooge for mentioning my concerns (let’s think of them as suggestions!) here. If it were still the brainchild of a 17-year-old girl who was looking for a creative way to honor her grandmother and maybe come up with something to put on your college app as a nice side bonus, I’d keep my trap shut. And, again, I don’t have a problem with what they’re actually doing, even if I’d like to see it broaden out a bit (if the group can harness its resources to put on the hot-pink-carpet Glammy Awards, maybe it could also find volunteers versed in, say, massage therapy or senior yoga, which has as many mental health benefits as lipstick. And yes, I know I’m nitpicking here). I’d also love to see the group expand its nascent attempts to have a larger dialogue about beauty: The group partnered with photographer Annie Levy for “Conversations in Beauty,” a 2010 photo exhibit at a New York nursing home documenting the group’s work and exploring intergenerational ideas of beauty.
 

But I think that a resourceful group of young women who have managed to find a unique niche way to help the community can also find ways to truly frame it as a more mutual experience. The site says, “Our teen volunteers become the voices for these women writing about their experiences in GlamourGals journals, school essays or college applications.” And of course teens are web-savvy and are the ones who have broader access to public mouthpieces, not the older women. But I’ll keep my eyebrow a tad raised about this idea that a teenager—even an intelligent, kind one—can appropriately "become the voice" of a woman with decades more life experience, and that a college application is the best place for that voice to take center stage.

Championing Jane Eyre

Kate at Eat the Damn Cake meditates here on the word plain. My favorite part is this:

Personally, I don’t believe in plainness. I don’t think it exists. I’ve never seen a person who looked plain. And I refuse to allow people to be rendered invisible and meaningless by their appearances. How can you have a face and be plain?

In my interviews with women, the word itself has come up quite a bit (in the transcripts, not in what I've published), but I've noted that the word only comes up when the speaker is talking about other people. "I have friends who think they're plain," "Somebody might be what you might call plain"—that sort of thing.

You know what word hasn't come up? Ugly. Except in one distinct context: When the speaker is saying what they're not. "I mean, I know I'm not ugly or anything," "I don't think you'd look at me and say I'm ugly," and so on.

It's an interesting contrast: People like to say that women are critical of one another, but the women I've spoken to (who, granted, are self-selected) have been very hesitant to suggest that another woman could be a word that's as ugly as, well, ugly. It suggests a sort of aggression, a sort of personality disorder in addition to any lack of physical graces. Plain, on the other hand, seems somehow kinder, even though, as Kate points out, it means that "you're not even fascinatingly strange looking." But it suggests someone who may have a strong moral character, someone whose features are assembled as one would expect.

I'm not sure what to make of why women are more eager to apply it to themselves as a contrast point of what they're not. I'm guessing that it's because by setting up a contrast of how they think they look, setting up an aggressive standard like ugly sounds less conceited than something more neutral like plain. Saying you're "not ugly" could mean that you conceive of yourself as being plain, or as being pretty or beautiful or striking or whatever—but it leaves it up to the listener to think on it, without being specific, which is interesting because ugly is a pretty specific word.

"Not plain" means that you acknowledge that you're—I dunno, decorated? The very notion of the word plain and how it's used in older books is more of someone who hasn't been graced with the features of what our society traditionally considered beautiful—that you haven't been "decorated" not by your own hand, but by the powers that be.

 Clearly a certain art director never read the book.

I'll be honest: I dislike the word too, for the reasons Kate enumerates, but honestly I'd rather be called plain than ugly. It fits into that whole notion of thinking of myself as low-key, leaving whatever beauty someone might find in me up to the other person, not my own actual features or what I've done with them. And let's not forget that there's a whole subsection of romance novels devoted to "plain" heroines. There's something deeply appealing about the notion that "plain" women, by virtue of their charm, charisma, kindness, vitality, or other virtues, can become beautiful—physically beautiful, not only full of what we refer to as "inner beauty." We want to champion that heroine, and we feel more virtuous in doing so, because we're all so attached to beauty that we feel as though we're automatically rooting for the underdog.

Housebound Beauty

Not leaving the house in two days plus recently discovering the existence of lipstick has made me feel vaguely like Baby Jane.

Blanche, you aren't ever gonna sell this house...and you aren't ever gonna leave it either.

Normally I don't wear makeup at home alone, but because of Snowpocalypse (SnOMG, Snowmaggedon, etc.), today is the second day I've gotten ready for work, only to check my e-mail and see that my manager has kindly recommended I work from home.

It's been partly fun—I feel a bit like a saucy housewife (no pool boy, alas), what with the contrast between my college sweatshirt, pencil-updo, and bright red lips. But it's also making me feel a little ridiculous, like I am indeed waiting for a poolboy who isn't ever going to show up. It's a well-timed reminder that my recent plunge into the joys of 'stick is thrilling to me in part because it's a relief from decades of having approached my makeup kit with either a quiet sullenness or a sense of self-satisfied duty.

I love doing this project because of the varieties of viewpoints I hear from women I interview, and I'd initially thought that doing this would help me come up with some sort of beauty manifesto of my own. It's too early to tell, but thus far I'd say that what I've learned is that I needn't have that manifesto—that our attitudes toward cosmetics and beauty shift daily, even hourly, depending on mood, circumstance. Hell, it's built into the whole conceit: The stuff washes off, right?

The lipstick is still on, though. Happy snow day, America—

Rosie Molinary, Author, Charlotte, NC

I came across the book Beautiful You serendipitously, one of a few stray review copies at a magazine where I worked at the time. I’ve read plenty of “you go, girl!” works designed to increase self-acceptance, but what sets Beautiful You apart is its day-by-day actionability. Day 50: “Ask others to define beauty.” Day 192: “Lift weights.” Day 268: “Give flowers.” Some exercises launch enormous mental projects, of course (Day 114: “Let go”), but the book is a concrete, meditative guide to getting at the root of what makes so many women feel not-so-great about their appearance. 

Its author, Rosie Molinary, also penned Hijas Americanas: Beauty, Body Image, and Growing Up Latina; in addition, she’s a speaker, teacher, activist, and mother. Her own stories shine through in Beautiful You; by the time we actually spoke, I felt as though I were hearing a familiar, generous voice, one as mellifluous as her words (but with the faintest Carolina twang). We talked about the beauty of the unattainable, the reason Latinas get a disproportionate amount of plastic surgery, and why to get a professional bra fitting. In her own words:   

On the “Latina Mystique”

One of the things that has been emphasized over the years with beauty is searching for the unattainable. When I was growing up, there weren’t any Latinas in the media, so there wasn’t something anybody could consider to search for. The unattainable we were searching for was being tall, thin, and blonde. But in the last 10 years, there have been Latinas more prominently in the media—which, for those who aren’t tan or dark or what’s often called “exotic,” has created a craving for that. We covet beauty as what we literally can’t attain. 

I wrote Hijas in my early 30s, and I was talking to women in their late teens and early to mid-20s about Latinas in the media. When I was 18, if I said to someone I was Puerto Rican, they’d say, “Puerto what?” I grew up in South Carolina, and there weren’t other Latinas around. So I thought these women were going to say that it was so much easier to come of age now when there were Latinas in the media—and that ended up not being the reaction at all. Instead, they talked about how it created a really hard standard for them. I was getting “Puerto what?”, but fast-forward to young women now, and if they say they’re Puerto Rican and happen to be Afro-Latina, so they’re black Puerto Rican, people are like, “Why don’t you look like Jennifer Lopez?” Because in the media there’s a bit of a poster girl for each country. You’re Mexican, it’s Salma Hayek; you’ve got Jennifer Lopez for Puerto Rico, Eva Mendes for Cuba. If you’re African American, there’s not just one African American actress to compare you to; if you’re white, there’s not just one white woman to be compared to. 

On the Pain and Effort of Beauty

Something I didn’t know before researching Hijas was that Latinas get the most plastic surgery of any subgroup in the U.S., which is interesting because Latinas are not the wealthiest minority in the U.S. There’s a lot of discretionary dollars being spent on something that seems optional for someone who doesn’t have a lot of discretionary dollars. I talked about this with the head of plastic surgery at the University of Kentucky, who happens to be Latin American. And he said—I’m paraphrasing—that Latina women are aware that beauty takes effort, and that it’s not painless. He said something along the lines of: When I have a client come in from any background that’s not Latina, it’s 50/50 as to whether they’re going to get the surgery. But if I have somebody who’s Latina who’s already made this appointment with me for a consultation, there is nothing I’m going to tell them about the pain or recovery that will talk them out of it. Latina women are ultimately always aware that beauty is a sacrifice.

The other interesting thing he said was that he felt Latina women were more willing to own up to the effort. You might run into a woman of a non-Latina background and say she looks great, and she’ll say, “Oh, I just threw myself together this morning,” like it’s this effortless perfection. But if you run into a Latina woman and say, “You look really nice,” her reaction will be, “Oh, thanks! I worked overtime to buy this dress, I’ve got on this girdle, it took me three hours to get my hair like this.” She’ll own up to the effort, because part of it is wanting people to know they thought this event warranted that effort and respect. I see some truth in that. 

On Knowing But Not Believing

When I interviewed women for Hijas, I asked what they thought was beautiful. And to a person, they would say: confidence, being kind, helping others, loving others. In general, no one said anything physical in their definition of beauty! Then I would ask, “Do you consider yourself beautiful?” and they would say, “Who, me? Oh, no, no, I’m not beautiful.” Now, 30 minutes earlier, they were talking to me about how passionate they were as a schoolteacher, or how much they championed their younger sister. There were all these earlier references that indicated to me they matched their definition of beauty. I would lay this out to them, and I had several women after our conversations—I probably interviewed 100 women and 12 to 15 e-mailed me later about this—say, “It was significant to me that you pointed out the inconsistency in how I view myself and how I view others.” 

Women are raised to be demure and to deflect. And we aren’t really allowed to be gracious about ourselves. Often we’re raised not to just be good girls; we translate that into being perfect girls. So it’s not okay for us to judge ourselves on these gracious standards that we give others—we need to be higher than that standard. And it’s paralyzing, because what can happen is that we believe that if some aspect of our physicality changes, then we’ll finally be happy. And the truth is, a negative body image isn’t only about how you feel about your body. It’s rooted in so much more, and unless you deal with those things, you’re going to be unhappy no matter how long your hair or how much you weigh. 

But there’s a comfortable storyline in existing in what you’ve always believed. You know how it’s going to play out, you know what it means you can do, what you can’t do. All the choices are clear. So what happens when someone says—and this isn’t exactly what I’m saying, but it’s a part of it—if you feel bad about yourself, you’re making a choice to feel bad about yourself. What I’m inviting you to do is not make that choice anymore. Then all of the answers can be different, and how do those things play out? And that’s hard, because it’s the unknown. But it’s also ultimately the most satisfying place you can land.

On the “Beautiful You” Exercises

There aren’t that many appearance-oriented things that are important to me. But I do have some exercises in Beautiful You that are appearance-oriented. [Examples: Visit a makeup artist, get a professional bra fitting, get a haircut.] For some women those things reflect self-care, and that’s been part of the volition of some women—increased disposable income and what to do with that. I didn’t want to leave out those women from the Beautiful You journey. And I have my moments too—I had my first professional adult bra fitting a few years ago, and it made a significant difference in how my clothes felt. It had a really positive effect on me, and I hadn’t expected that; I just needed a bra and this woman came in and was like, “You need to try this,” and I was like, “Oh my god, that is what I need to try!” There are areas where we could use somebody who knows a little bit more than we do.  

That said, I don’t think that every single day is a fit for every single woman. I think it’s okay to make the book a choose-your-own-adventure book. But I think it’s important that if you’re particularly resistant to something that you do it, because there’s a reason you’re resistant to it, and you can get a bit of insight. 

On Day 73: “Use Something You’ve Been Saving for a Special Occasion”

I have this beautiful, expensive purse. I didn’t feel my behaviors warranted such a beautiful or expensive piece in my life—I’d literally used it twice. And finally one day I looked at it in this little bag gathering dust, and was like, “This is the most absurd thing. I have this beautiful thing...in my closet.” What’s the point of having a nice thing if you’re not going to enjoy it? Too often we deny ourselves pleasure. And part of recognizing beauty is experiencing pleasure. Sometimes pleasure is as simple as taking something out to enjoy that you don’t typically let yourself enjoy. What was that about, with my purse? Why was I punishing myself? Why wasn’t I worth it? Now I don’t take it out if it’s raining, but if I’m wearing certain outfits I am rocking that bag. 

On Her Definition of Beauty in 25 Words or Less

Giving and experiencing love. I think I have 21 words left? But that's it for me.

Our Very Well-Moisturized Chinese Future

To be frank, I don't usually pay much attention to the whole China-and-or-India-is-going-to-take-us-over-soon stream of news. I want my country to be a global presence and global protector, but given that we've failed so miserably in the latter I often just take a que sera, sera mindset and just hope that my new Chinese-and-or-Indian global emperor will give me health insurance already.

Seeing the numbers here, though, made my eyes pop. In 2010, high-end beauty product sales increased 4% in the U.S., 3% in France, 2% in Italy, and TWENTY-SIX PERCENT in China. Twenty-six percent! The future not only speaks Mandarin, the future is armed with Chanel.

Also interesting in the report is that "prestige beauty" posted the biggest increase in skin care, whereas the mass market saw its biggest increase in cosmetics. Are poor women sticking to the maxim of the lipstick economy while better-off women make a longer-term investment in their body's largest organ? (Not that most of it works anyway.)

Why Are Studies Giving Misleading Data About Women's Preferences?

The gross amount of coverage of the royal wedding notwithstanding, most readers here are American women. Still, this British study's findings about the importance of looks over health probably ring true on this side of the pond as well. The headlines resulting from the study read like, "Women Spend More on Beauty Than Health," "Women Choose Beauty Over Health," "Women Care About Their Looks More Than Health to the Tune of £108 a Year," and so on. The bloody horror of it all!

But one look at the type of questions being asked in the survey reveals that this is a classic case of faulty studies making headlines that make the ladies seem a tad vacant. The study found that an average of £336 was spent on cosmetic items, but £228 was being spent on vitamins and gym memberships. Vitamins and gym memberships: Yes, the only way to be healthy! Sure, it's not like Britain allows its citizens loads of opportunities for wintertime sports, but still: People can walk, hike, do yoga, go dancing, and do all sorts of things that are probably healthier than going to the gym because they're incorporated into one's lifestyle. (As for vitamins, when I duly presented my physician with a list of the supplements I was taking, she suppressed a laugh. "You're young, you're healthy, you're eating a balanced diet, you don't have any major health problems," she said. "You can save your money.")

 If you type "women" and "health" into a royalty-free image engine, this is what you get.

There's more: "Six in ten would rather live their life to the full and ‘embrace life’s excesses’ rather than worry about ‘being squeaky clean,'" the study bemoans--which, to me, indicates that these 6 in 10 are okay having that slice of chocolate cake instead of restricting themselves in order to be "squeaky clean," seems like a good thing. But in the context of the study, this is lumped in with evidence of how health matters less than beauty. Am I misreading? (To be sure, the study also had the prerequisite upsetting statistics—which are no less upsetting for how common they are—disordered eating is rampant in the name of beauty.)

I guess I've just started becoming more skeptical of the idea that most women just really hate the way we look. What I've found pretty quickly in the interviews I've been doing is that, yes, a lot of women have negative issues with their appearance, and those issues are far-reaching and immensely complex. But part of that complexity is those beams of confidence and not quite knowing what to do with those moments or phases. I think back to myself at 13 and the way I secretly embraced my utterly dorky looks, and I realize that even though my greatest doubts came after that time, there's also a strong core I have within me that is totally okay with how I look--and that has been true of every woman I've interviewed so far, even if they've engaged in negative behaviors when that belief has faltered. I don't examine those times much because, hey, I'm feeling fine! But if you primed me with a questionnaire about beauty, health, purchasing power, and what I would do to fit into size 4 jeans, the negative part of me would know to creep out and write in her answers on my behalf. Because that part of me knows it's needier than the breezy, carefree part, so she speaks louder when she's around. I'm guessing that's what was at play with these 3,000 women too--not that we don't have a long way to go, baby, but I don't think we need to be as grim as some headlines would have it either.