This is not going to sound as serious as the headline indicates about “women suffering for beauty”. We’re not going to talk about plastic surgery, stomach stapling, or any other sort of very serious lengths to which women (and increasingly men) may go to look fabulous. Instead, we’re going to talk about those little, at-home, mundane beauty rituals or extreme, uncomfortable measures we will go to just to achieve that latest look.
One of those rituals is leg shaving. Yes, it’s become a matter more of hygiene in today’s looks-conscious world, but is shaving your legs really necessary to your health or hygiene? Um, not really – as a matter of fact, it has just become part of women’s bare bones approach to sex appeal and keeping one’s appearance up, which sucks because shaving legs is one of the most time consuming and boring parts of my routine, and I routinely skip it a lot in the winter, because well, I just hate doing it!
Another thing that comes to mind when I think of my suffering for beauty is a laugh-worthy incident in my cousin’s bathroom when we were growing up. I had just discovered Sun-In for my hair, and thought it would be so cool if I could get natural highlights by laying out in the sun with this stuff in, since my mom wouldn’t yet let me get my hair colored. Well, after my cousin and I laid out in the sun with our Sun-In in our hair, we went inside, and thought we should make our eyebrows match our hair.
So, like a couple of young kids who didn’t know any better, we sprayed the stuff on our eyebrows, not thinking about our eyes, really more just thinking about the beauty aspect, and she and I took turns blowing eachother’s eyebrows dry with a hair dryer, to make them a little lighter. It was very uncomfortable, and yes – stupid. But that’s just an example how we learned at a very young age that we would be willing to “suffer” for beauty.
So, we pluck, poke, prod, shave, blow dry, shampoo, condition, put masks on our faces, exfoliate, cleanse, tone, and do God knows what else to our faces to maintain beauty. And it doesn’t end there. What about self tanning? God knows the last thing I want to do in the morning is slather my whole body with self tanner, let it dry for a half hour while I’m freezing my butt off, and then stink up the clothes I wear once it activates, and yet I do it every summer!
And what about cellulite treatment? I use a special pronged device whenever I can at night to help remove cellulite, and I never feel like doing it, but yet I do as much as I can. There’s cutting and filing of the nails, painting them, giving ourselves pedicures, coloring our own hair, sometimes cutting our own hair and tons of other things we will do just to be a little more beautiful. But in the end, isn’t it all worth it?
