Beauty

Mental Floss is a really interesting website with both videos and articles that provide information, granted it's usually fairly trivial, but that doesn't make it any less interesting.  I especially enjoy reading the articles about grammar and history and I subscribe to it in my RSS feed, but it's one of those feeds where you can't actually read the article in your preferred news aggregator application.  So I have to click through to the website in order to read beyond the headline.  This also happens to be a site where there are lots of links to articles you can click on at the bottom of the story.  So several times I'd seen a link to an article titled "30 Fairly Shocking Pictures of Celebrities Without Makeup".  I just ignored it the first several times I saw it, but then I decided to go ahead and be salacious for a moment.

Side note:  I generally don't look at these types of things because that just encourages photographers to stalk celebrities and harass them, which I don't approve of; after all, they're people too.  So I'm not going to link to the site here, but you have the information to search if you feel so inclined.

I didn't look at all the pictures because I don't actually really care (I also didn't even know who they all were), but I looked at enough to draw a few conclusions:

• There is still a double-standard when it comes to gender and grooming.  It's not news when a male celebrity goes out in normal clothes without being all fancied up.  Why should women be made to feel "less" if they just want to quickly run out without spending hours making themselves up?  Apparently I really was impacted by feminism in the 70s and 80s, because this truly bothers me.
• Those women actually look a lot like me.  I don't normally wear makeup and I let my hair air dry into its natural waves every morning.  If my husband and I are going out for a date I'll put some light makeup on, but otherwise I go au naturale.  My husband affectionately refers to me as his "wash and wear" wife.  I've never been embarrassed about the way I look (although aging is causing me to feel less happy with the reflection in the mirror*), I've just always been very realistic about the fact that I'm not going to do any modeling or win any beauty pageants.  But seeing these women who are held up as the gold standard of beauty in our society looking like a normal person is in some ways validating.
• Beauty can be manufactured.  Whether it's compliments of an amazing makeup artist, or someone who's really good at photoshopping pictures, people can be made to look more symmetrical and appealing than they actually are.  Which is actually good news, and I hope that every young girl realizes that with the proper makeup and photo touch-ups she can look as good as the models and movie stars who she probably currently feels physically inferior to, and with that realization feels good about herself as she is and realizes that those women aren't any more beautiful than she is.
• Real beauty comes from being a good person.  This isn't one I saw in the photos, just what I've experienced.  I've known people who at first glance I thought were very attractive, but after getting to know them and seeing some pretty unsavory behaviors, they didn't look so good to me any longer. On the flip-side, I've met people who were just very average looking at first glance, who were so good and kind that they started to look very beautiful to me over time.

So while I still don't condone paparazzi practically mauling people to enable voyeurism, if even one young girl or woman sees those pictures and realizes that she's beautiful too, then maybe that really was a good article/slide show.

*  I remember when I was young and smooth and wrinkle-free and I pretty harshly judged my mother's contemporaries for being so concerned about the fact that they were aging.  I distinctly recall thinking:  "It's just a natural part of life and it happens to everyone; stop being so vain."  Which is all good and well, until it started happening to me and now I have more sympathy.