Beauty is the cruelest of task masters.
When it comes to the Pretty Principle, enough is never enough. Between all the body-sculpting, aerobicizing, waxing, hair coloring, moisturizing, and airbrushing, the building of the perfect beast is beginning to wear us down. There’s a quagmire of products that promise to augment your lips, thicken your eyelashes, or brighten your smile, all of which are supposed to unlock some hidden potential you lack in influencing people.
Now, never once has a smile — essentially an involuntary facial reflex we’ve ascribed a social magic to and that any sociopath can flash at will — won me over, nor have I ever noticed another person’s teeth when I meet them. Men will buy penis enhancement pills and women have tried creams that purport to enlarge their breasts, but if I applied that logic beyond genitalia and offered you a product that could, say, increase the length of your arms or legs, would you buy it?
It’s the beauty mandate called tanning — more than even steroids — that I loathe the most. As a lifelong paleface, I’ve been made privy — always without asking — to casual urgings that I should get some sun to make myself more appealing, the implication being that fairness makes you some sort of of photosensitive albino who dwells in darkness with a cadre of bats and mushrooms as your sole companions.
One barely-casual acquaintance (a cunt) I encountered in a gym (wherein everyone always looked as if they’d just traipsed in off the Aegean seashore year-round) advised me that I looked positively anemic and waif-like. All the while I simply took in the extremity of his sun worship and marveled how, at maybe thirty-six, the pores on his arms were craterous, his skin had the tone more so of adobe than sunkissed, and he was developing bastard lines that ran from his eyes down to his jawline.
How weirdly paradoxical the obsession with epidermal beauty is; it would be the nadir of tactlessness to suggest that a non-caucasian should lighten his skin — those who would or even do are viewed as the ultimate of sell-outs — yet we who are naturally fair are pressured to alter our pigment as if it were nothing. (read the full article)
