Beauty: More Than a Façade
Nothing compares to the sheer terror a twelve-year-old girl feels when hot wax raises above their line of vision, attached to the hand of a woman they momentarily and passionately hate, despite the fact that the intentions of the wax holder are pure. As the hot wax comes into contact with the young girl’s brow, a vociferation of terror will tear from the young throat, despite the fact that the wax-holder only wants to make their patient more beautiful. After tears and terror, the girl will peer into the mirror with watery eyes- watery eyes that clear up as soon as her image comes into focus.
Despite the temporary red marks left across her eyebrows, the girl will see on herself the results that gaze at her from the pages of Teen Vogue and Cosmo Girl: perfect eyebrows. From this joy, the girl inadvertently resigns herself to a life forever committed to wax: wax on her eyebrows, wax on her chin and upper lip, armpits and hot wax on unmentionable lower body parts. As she resigns herself to the fact that beauty is pain, she forgets to remember that inner beauty is just as important, if not more important, than a beautiful façade.
Two hundred years ago, people did not have all their teeth, and their remaining teeth melted together in waves of yellow and brown. Over the summer, I encountered a woman with missing teeth. Though at twenty-one I should have been mature enough not to judge, I tried not to talk to her. In fact, I went completely out of my way to avoid her. Despite, the woman terrified me. She looked like a scarier real life version of Snow White’s evil stepmother in hag form, and that was not a line I wanted to cross. Thanks to fairy tales, I knew what happened to young women who crossed paths with ugly hags.
Despite my embarrassing repulsion of this woman, such a sighting would not have been out of the ordinary in the days of Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet died of love for one another, but if either were seen by today’s society they would be classified as dirty, unwashed, and unclean. Though women practiced their own beauty trends in centuries preceding the twentieth century, no pain compares to the lengths modern women go to in order to receive the perfect image they see in magazines, regardless of the fact that everyone knows Cosmopolitan airbrushes the women on their front covers and reporters can easily alter the body weight given by an actress during a celebrity interview.
In 2008, the movie Penelope came out. Produced by Reese Witherspoon and starring Christina Ricci and James McAvoy, the film gives young girls a modern day fairy tale about a girl born with a cursed pig nose. At the age of twenty-five, Penelope’s life has played out entirely within the confines of her own home. As a child, Penelope never had the option of walking through the front door or playing in her backyard. Convinced that the love of a social elite will break the curse on her daughter’s face, Penelope’s mother pours herself into countless matchmaking attempts, breaking Penelope’s heart a little at a time. Frustrated with these attempts and tired of her self-loathing, Penelope breaks free, running out of her house to live a life of independence. The internal pain Penelope expresses in this movie is not uncommon among women of all ages in the United States.
Due to media images, comparisons to other women, the rush to find a soul mate and low self-esteem, American women do not simply believe in beauty. They believe in beauty as perfection, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve their idea of perfection. According to the viewpoint of Patricia Hampl’s female relatives:
“A woman was not ‘beautiful’, not even ‘pretty’. It was more complicated than that. She had perfect skin, but her hands were bad; she had lovely brown eyes, but she was fat; her legs were good but what were legs if her teeth were crooked? The body was a collection of unfederated states, constantly at odds with each other, recognizing no sovereign to sort out the endless clan feuds,” (3).
When a woman becomes obsessed with an idea of unobtainable beauty, she automatically grants herself unnecessary pain with every look in the mirror and step on the scale.
In September, my friend and I searched high and low for Penelope. We could not find it anywhere. It did not stand on the shelves at the local Blockbuster, Wal-Mart, or Best Buy. On our fourth attempt, we found Penelope wedged on the shelves of an entertainment store, but we almost did not find it there. Stacked among ten-dollar best selling movies, Penelope lurked in the background of the shelves. Unlike its neighbors, only three copies of Penelope were available and instead of costing half of twenty dollars, they cost thirty—on sale. We bought the movie anyway.
Though ecstatic to watch Penelope, my friend and I could not find the time. Eventually, we wound up watching it late at night with a group of boys. The boys hated it. They called it the weirdest movie ever filmed, stating that no man could ever love a woman with a snout. They wanted to turn it off the second it started. Much to my chagrin, my friend agreed with them. Not used to movies with fairy tale morals every young girls holds close to her heart, she too thought it was a tad bit too ridiculous. As soon as the boys left the apartment, however, she wanted to watch it again. We ended up watching it four times in the next week, loving every second of it. We loved to watch the grief-stricken Penelope come into her own throughout the movie, transforming into an independent, self-loving woman, regardless of her unpleasant snout. And the best part? When she admitted to her mother that she liked the way she was and that she did not want to change, her curse broke. Her snout vanished, replaced by a cute button nose lying in the middle of a beautiful face.
Ironically, Penelope did not regret the pain she felt during her entire life. If she had not experienced such intense self-depreciation, she would not have realized how wonderful it was to be her best self, inside and out—but mostly inwardly. Though beauty had been laced with emotional pain throughout her entire life, Penelope rose above it. She made a stand for herself, and realized beauty did not have to be painful. As long as she remained true to herself, she was beautiful.
Penelope shows an evolution of beauty. As far as history shows, women have always lusted after beauty. Many women believe, somewhat factually, that beauty leads to acceptance. This philosophy is shown in magazines, TV shows, and numerous types of media, but it is not entirely true. Inner beauty is more important than a beautiful façade, and every woman who realizes this walks with a little more bounce in her step than the woman next door. History shows that beauty is pain, inward and outward, but the history of beauty is not what matters. What matters it the evolution each individual woman undergoes to accept herself and to love her image, both inside and out.
