I often find myself questioning why people do certain things in the name of beauty, and though this could just be my extra regular, guy mind at work, sometimes I think it’s a crazy waste of time. When I started my freshman year of high school, I still had a baby face, smooth and innocent looking. Over Christmas break I saw a couple of bumps on the forehead, nothing major, but by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, I had legit acne. Kept it for a long time too, not on purpose, that’s just the hand I was dealt. Sure, I tried the products they said cured it, but none truly did. Seeing as not everyone was impacted by acne the same way, in this ridicule heavy environment, my confidence took a hit. Add to that, my cousins weren’t hit with acne, they all had smooth skin with the occasional pimple which they treated like a crisis. Meanwhile, I was creating star patterns on my forehead with no true option, I just had to deal with it. All that to say, I understand the feeling of being dealt with a less than ideal hand in the beauty department.

Two things happened in the fairly early days of acne that helped out a lot. The first thing was me going to a back-to-school concert in the park right before my sophomore year. I was walking with my cousin through the crowd, and I saw a young lady that didn’t have a nose, posing for a picture with some other girls. In that moment I thought, whoa that’s rough because in the top 5 things I noticed immediately acne wasn’t one. Not to mention, she was smiling while posing, so despite this huge attention-grabbing, lack of a facial feature, she was making the best of it. The second thing was a girl that I thought was cute also had a crush on me. I never thought I was ugly, but acne will make you feel that way. Once the girls began crushing though, my confidence was back regardless of breakouts and such. Suddenly, the personality that I’m kind of known for started to blossom. 

Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself

Coco Chanel

Sprung a Leak

I was on my way to Houston yesterday and I saw a woman with very obvious, maybe poorly done, lip injections waiting to board the plane. When I first saw her face, the look she had made me think she’s a jerk, but I reserved judgment because I was giving the benefit of the doubt that her over inflated lips may have been causing the scowl affixed to her face. Once we were on the plane, both of us seated in first class, I was able to observe that she was indeed an asshole. Not only was she looking mean at everyone, but she was also rude to the flight attendant. About 90 minutes into the flight, she began massaging her upper lip. The scowl that she once had now resembled the look of shame I had when acne first invited itself into my life. She requested some napkins from the flight attendant and began soaking up some liquid from her lip. This continued until we landed and got off the plane about 90 minutes later. The last time I saw her, she was going into the lady’s room, and I was going on with my day not feeling bad for her at all.

The incident with this lady occurred 4 months ago as of the date of this post, but for all I know, her lip could still be leaking, lord knows she had enough filler in them to achieve a slow drip this long. I’ve never understood lip injections. Unlike breast augmentation, the outcome never looks better than the origin. This includes the Jenner and Kardashian clan members paying ridiculous amounts of money to look as close to bi-racial as possible. If you look at their elementary school pictures and maybe even high school, there’s absolutely no way that the natural progression after 10 years would yield faces remotely similar to what they have now. They are the people magazines and entertainers consider beautiful. The look of having an allergic reaction is now considered beautiful and call me crazy, but I think there’s a lot wrong with that. 

Personal Image

Coincidentally, the day before that flight, we were going to drop my dog off at the boarding place and this song “I Know Victoria’s Secret” came on. My wife and I had a disagreement, rather, a different take on what really is Victoria’s worst secret. She agreed with the singer of the song’s take that this company was owned by a man, promoting unrealistic images of models causing real life women to have unrealistic expectations and mental health issues. Sure, that’s damaging to some, but that’s not their biggest sin to me. My take was their biggest secret was using free prison labor to produce their products, thereby benefitting from institutional slavery, that seems worse to me. Add to that, women are fed these fabricated standards of beauty from every outlet to include other women, not just Vicky’s Secret. If it’s coming from everywhere, you can’t reasonably single them out as the worst, unless the goal is to make a song that is catchy of course. 

Do What You Please

I don’t personally care what a person does to feel better about how he/she looks. However, when the standard of beauty is some celebrity dealing with an identity crisis, what exactly is expected of the people that want to be like them? My guess, an identity crisis and misplaced worship maybe? Am I to believe people are making their mouths look like Vienna sausages because they have high self-esteem? I surely hope not. That young lady with no nose had significantly more confidence than these women having meltdowns because their lips are thin or their butts are flat. I’m sure she felt less than pretty at times, reasonably so, because not having a nose stands out…way more than having thin lips and flat butt cheeks.

Maybe I’m out of touch though. I mean, Brazilian butt lifts, Michelin tire lips, 5 inch finger nails, and fake eyelashes long enough to fan the lady in front of you in church are considered pretty to those that get them and I think people wearing them look like they should be Cirque du Soleil performers. These celebrities with too much time and money are butchering themselves to look attractive (and failing I might add), while transforming into disfigured, ghoulish looking creatures, especially when the 8 layers of makeup and photoshop filters are taken away. Worse even is the elephant in the room. The people who typically have thick lips and rounded butt cheeks naturally are deemed less attractive by those mutilating themselves to look like them…let that sink in. I sometimes wonder how Black and Hispanic women feel when society tells them they’re good enough to mimic, but not good enough to ever be the standard of beauty.